Tsutomu Oikawa Pages 406 - 417 ( 12 )
The development of therapeutic agents with mechanisms of action different from those of traditional chemotherapeutic drugs is now required in the field of anti-cancer drug therapy, and different approaches to this problem have been made. Considerable attention has been paid to compounds able to interfere with tumor-related angiogenesis. This is due to (1) increasing evidence that both tumor growth and metastasis depend on angiogenesis, and (2) accumulated findings indicating that different types of angiogenesis inhibitors can prevent these two phenomena. Now it is expected that treatment involving angiogenesis inhibitors will become a new strategy for cancer therapy. This review concerns the approaches we have taken so far for finding novel angiogenesis inhibitors as potential therapeutic agents for cancer.