A&M Researcher Receives Grant from the American Heart Association

The human body has the amazing ability to respond to disease and trauma by growing new blood vessels that in turn supply injured or diseased tissues with increased amounts of oxygen and nutrients. In some cases, such as with cancer, malignant cells can actually "hijack" this process and force the growth of new blood vessels to feed a tumor. Many therapies and treatments currently in practice attempt to destroy these new blood vessels in hopes of "starving" the invading cells.

New research funded by the American Heart Association and conducted by Dr. Gonzalo Rivera, assistant professor in veterinary pathobiology at Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, aims to understand the formation of new blood vessels (called angiogenesis) with the hope to discover ways to prevent their growth before it happens.

"Using these approaches and with the support of this new grant from the American Heart Association, we will address the outstanding critical issues of how endothelial cells (cells lining our blood vessels) integrate multiple clues from the surrounding tissues and translate them into internal biochemical signals; and how cytoskeletal changes induced by the these biochemical signals influence vascular formation and organization," notes Rivera.

The results from this research will expand the knowledge that researchers have about how the body responds to trauma and disease at the cellular level, providing new opportunities to develop therapies for diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and traumatic injury.

Article: http://vetmed.tamu.edu/news/press-releases/am-researcher-receives-grant-from-the-american-heart-association/?utm_source=tamutimes&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2012-01-24