Angiogenesis as a potential biomarker in prostate cancer chemoprevention trials

Prostate cancer is a multistep process in which progression rather than initiation may be the rate-limiting step. A strong possibility is that prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia lesions that switch to angiogenic phenotype eventually progress to cancer. However, it is a challenging task to quantitate angiogenesis in preneoplastic lesions. A promising approach to measuring angiogenesis involves real-time TaqMan polymerase chain reaction to quantitate mRNAs encoding a panel of angiogenesis markers. This highly sensitive molecular technique has potential for quantitating angiogenesis in clinical settings and can be used as a high-throughput screening procedure in prostate cancer clinical trials.