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Drug discovery

A lifeline for suffocating tissues

Nature volume 453, pages 1194–1195 (2008)Cite this article

When a blood vessel becomes blocked, the ideal treatment would be a drug that induces new vessel formation in the damaged tissue, without affecting healthy tissues. With the chemical nitrite, we might be on to a winner.

Ischaemia occurs, for instance, when a blood vessel becomes occluded by a clot. It affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and is often life-threatening. So there is an urgent need for molecular factors that could stimulate new vessel growth (angiogenesis) and so promote revascularization of ischaemic tissues. Progress so far has not been particularly noteworthy, and one major problem is that some potential angiogenic factors promote vascularization in healthy tissues as well as in the ischaemic tissue, causing undesirable side effects. Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Kumar et al.1 revive hope that a drug might one day become available. They report that systemic administration of nitrite (NO2−), which is reduced to nitric oxide (NO), for protracted periods restores blood flow in ischaemic tissue without stimulating angiogenesis in healthy tissues.

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Figure 1: Targeted effect.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Massimiliano Mazzone and Peter Carmeliet are in the Vesalius Research Center, University of Leuven, Flanders, Institute for Biotechnology (VIB), B-3000 Leuven, Belgium. peter.carmeliet@med.kuleuven.be ,

    Massimiliano Mazzone & Peter Carmeliet

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  1. Massimiliano Mazzone
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  2. Peter Carmeliet
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Mazzone, M., Carmeliet, P. A lifeline for suffocating tissues. Nature 453, 1194–1195 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/4531194a

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