Although open-heart surgery is a frequent treatment for heart disease, it remains extremely dangerous. Now groundbreaking research from Dr. Britta Hardy of Tel Aviv University's Sackler School of Medicine has shown the potential for an injected protein to regrow blood vessels in the human heart — eliminating the need for risky surgery altogether.

In-growth and new generation of blood vessels, which must take place if a wound is to heal or a tumor is to grow, have been thought to occur through a branching and further growth of a vessel against a chemical gradient of growth factors. Now a research team at Uppsala University and its University Hospital has shown that mechanical forces are considerably more important than was previously thought. The findings, published today in the journal Nature Medicine, open up a new field for developing treatments.

Nearly 90 percent of the 700,000 strokes that affect U.S. patients each year are caused by a blockage of blood vessels supplying the brain, known as ischemic stroke.

Researchers at Uppsala University have developed a new tool that makes it possible to study the signals in the body that control the generation of blood vessels.

Researchers at Heidelberg University have found a molecular mechanism for anaphylactic shock. The activation of specific proteins in the cell walls of small blood vessels plays an important role.

Mice exposed to low temperatures develop more blood vessels in their adipose tissue and metabolise body fat more quickly, according to a new study from Karolinska Institutet. Scientists now hope to learn how to control blood vessel development in humans in order to combat obesity and diabetes.

Researchers have found that two proteins which work in tandem in the brain's blood vessels present a double whammy in Alzheimer's disease. Not only do the proteins lessen blood flow in the brain, but they also reduce the rate at which the brain is able to remove amyloid beta, the protein that builds up in toxic quantities in the brains of patients with the disease.

Although its been over a decade since endothelial progenitor cells or EPCs, cells that circulate in the blood repairing and replacing the cells that line blood vessels, were identified, the field is still evolving.

In a breakthrough study appearing in advance online publication of Nature Methods, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University describe for the first time a method of viewing individual breast cancer cells for several days at a time. The study, by scientists in Einstein's Gruss Lipper Biophotonics Center, provides detail on how cancer cells invade surrounding tissue and reach blood vessels.

Yale researchers have taken the first critical steps in unraveling the mysteries of brain aneurysms, the often fatal rupturing of blood vessels that afflicts 500,000 people worldwide each year and nearly killed Vice President-elect Joseph Biden two decades ago.

Scientists have thought that one way to foil a tumor from generating blood vessels to feed its growth – a process called angiogenesis – was by creating drugs aimed at stopping a key vessel growth-promoting protein. But now the opposite seems to be true.

Like a burning fire, the brain is in constant need of oxygen, and when a blood vessel is blocked during a stroke, part of the brain becomes starved of oxygen and nutrients. When this happens, neurons in that part of the brain die off, leading to permanent loss of function in the parts of the body those neurons serve.