Abstract

Blood vessels and nerve fibres course throughout the body in an orderly pattern, often alongside one another. Although superficially distinct, the mechanisms involved in wiring neural and vascular networks seem to share some deep similarities. The discovery of key axon guidance molecules over the past decade has shown that axons are guided to their targets by finely tuned codes of attractive and repulsive cues, and recent studies reveal that these cues also help blood vessels to navigate to their targets. Parallels have also emerged between the actions of growth factors that direct angiogenic sprouting and those that regulate axon terminal arborization.

1. The Center for Transgene Technology and Gene Therapy (CTG), Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB), University of Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium
2. Division of Research, Genentech Inc, South San Francisco, California 94080, USA

Correspondence to: Peter Carmeliet¹ Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to P.C. (Email: peter.carmeliet@med.kuleuven.be) or M.T.-L. (Email: marctl@gene.com).

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