10-year safety follow-up in patients with local VEGF gene transfer to ischemic lower limb

Cancer immunotherapy: a paradigm shift for prostate cancer treatment

Prostate cancer remains a significant health problem for men in the Western world. Although treatment modalities are available, these do not confer long-term benefit and are accompanied by deleterious side effects. Immunotherapy represents a valuable alternative to conventional treatments by inducing tumour-specific immune responses that control the growth of cancer cells. Sipuleucel-T is approved by the FDA as an immunotherapeutic agent for the treatment of patients with asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). Although this approval has raised cost-versus-benefit issues, it has provided proof of concept for the therapeutic potential of active immunotherapy approaches for metastatic CRPC. Numerous clinical studies have demonstrated clinical benefit using immunotherapy compared to traditional chemotherapy and several active immunotherapy approaches (at various developmental stages)have demonstrated the potential to change the face of prostate cancer treatment.

VEGF gene therapy: therapeutic angiogenesis in the clinic and beyond

Despite the enormous progress made in terms of prevention and early intervention, a pressing need remains to develop innovative therapeutic strategies for ischemic cardiovascular disorders, including acute myocardial infarction, chronic cardiac ischemia, peripheral artery disease and stroke. The induction of new blood vessel formation by delivering angiogenic genes to ischemic tissues continues to appear as a promising, alternative strategy to currently available therapies. In aspiring to induce therapeutic angiogenesis, the members of the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) family have long been recognized as major molecular tools. Remarkably, VEGF family members have recently been recognized to also exert multiple, non-angiogenic effects on various cell types, including neurons, skeletal muscle and cardiac cells. Here, we critically review the VEGF-based therapies that have already reached clinical experimentation and highlight the pleiotropic activities of VEGF factors that might create new opportunities for therapeutic application.