Figure 2.

Pleiotropic survival effect of VEGF-B on multiple types of vascular cells. VEGF-A (orange particles) targets mainly vascular endothelial cells (EC, yellow). VEGF-B (green particles), however, targets not only vascular ECs, but also pericytes (PC, blue) and smooth muscle cells (SMC, red). Since blood vessels covered by PCs or SMCs are more resistant to antiangiogenic reagents and difficult to prune, antiangiogenic strategies targeting not only vascular ECs, but also PCs and SMCs simultaneously are desired. Our data showed that VEGF-B may be one such multi-target molecule.