Development of Anti-VEGF Therapies for Intraocular Use A Guide for Clinicians.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Ophthalmology Volume 2012, Article ID 483034, 13 pages doi:10.1155/2012/483034 Review Article Development of Anti-VEGF Therapies for Intraocular Use: A Guide for Clinicians Pearse A. Keane1 and Srinivas R. Sadda2 1 NIHR Biomedical Research Centre for Ophthalmology, Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, London EC1V 2PD, UK 2 Doheny Eye Institute and Department of Ophthalmology, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90033, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Srinivas R. Sadda, ssadda@ Received 8 September 2011; Accepted 1 November 2011 Academic Editor: Toshiaki Kubota Copyright © 2012 P. A. Keane and S. R. Sadda. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Angiogenesis is the process by which new blood vessels form from existing vessel networks. In the past three decades, significant progress has been made in our understanding of angiogenesis; progress driven in large part by the increasing realization that blood vessel growth can promote or facilitate disease. By the early 1990s, it had become clear that the recently discovered “vascular endothelial growth factor” (VEGF) was a powerful mediator of angiogenesis. As a result, several groups targeted this molecule as a potential mediator of retinal ischemia-induced neovascularization in disorders such as diabetic retinopathy and retinal vein occlusion. Around this time, it also became clear that increased intraocular VEGF production was not limited to ischemic retinal diseases but was also a feature of choro