Several diseases are attributed to either deficient or excessive vascularization, so understanding angiogenesis offers great promise for improving vascular therapies. Angiogenesis is primarily regulated by vascular endothelial growth factor receptors (VEGFRs), and changes in VEGFR protein expression are promising biomarkers for predicting the efficacy of VEGFR pathway inhibition. However, current data on VEGFR protein expression in human vessel biopsies are limited, given the invasive procedure necessary and difficulty in standardizing non-quantitative measurements across labs. Here, we pioneer a standardized workflow that consists of liquid biopsy-based quantitative flow cytometry and cell-by-cell data analysis. We employed this workflow to establish healthy baselines for VEGFRs on the plasma membranes of two key circulating angiogenic cell populations: circulating endothelial cells (cECs) and circulating progenitor cells (cPCs). Our findings provide new insights into how sex and age influence the distribution of VEGFRs on these circulating angiogenic cells.

Towards precision medicine: Establishing baseline measurements of angiogenic biomarkers on circulating cells

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.