Angiogenesis as a potential biomarker in prostate cancer chemoprevention trials

Prostate cancer is a multistep process in which progression rather than ini tiation may be the rate-limiting step. A strong possibility is that prostat ic intraepithelial neoplasia lesions that switch to angiogenic phenotype ev entually progress to cancer. However, it is a challenging task to quantitat e angiogenesis in preneoplastic lesions. A promising approach to measuring angiogenesis involves real-time TaqMan polymerase chain reaction to quantit ate mRNAs encoding a panel of angiogenesis markers. This highly sensitive m olecular technique has potential for quantitating angiogenesis in clinical settings and can be used as a high-throughput screening procedure in prosta te cancer clinical trials.