We can do this because tumor blood vessels are unlike normal, healthy vessels we see in other places of the body they're abnormal, they're very poorly constructed, and because of that, they're highly vulnerable to treatments that target them.

Sending abundant amounts of adrenaline into your blood stream.

So, let's say we follow just the left leg, so this artery over here on the top, it's gonna get a little bit smaller, and maybe I would call this a medium sized artery by this point.

So let's zoom in on one of them....Maybe we can zoom in right over here, that part of the artery.

And the Arotic valve is going to be what divides the left ventricle from this giant vessel that we talked about earlier.

Because it turns out that adipose tissue fat is highly angiogenesis dependent.

And once those vessels invade the cancer, it can expand, it can invade local tissues, and the same vessels that are feeding tumors allow cancer cells to exit into the circulation as metastases.

And this is an X ray showing you the patent, functional blood vessel.

In fact, if you actually block angiogenesis and prevent blood vessels from ever reaching cancer cells, tumors simply can't grow up.

The vessels are now a little bit less full of blood because a lot of that blood has already left and gone on to the foot and the face and the different parts of the body.

Blood flows through blood vessels.

It's gonna be going initially through a giant vessel.

And the capsules in her blood stream.

So we thought the patient might actually want to know the context as well.

The walls are covered with villi where nutrient absorption takes place.

So this is more challenging

The heart is taking a quick breather to refill.

Blood runs in the veins.

Yes.

The true capillaries are these guys out here.

You know, where did these things come from?

Then you start to take a look at adult life.

Can't seem to find a vein.

But what we now know, is that for a number of diseases, there are defects in the system, where the body can't prune back extra blood vessels, or can't grow enough new ones in the right place at the right time.

Size of tube

They are turning into dead tissue. This process of completely or almost completely depriving cells of oxygen so that they die, this is a heart attack.

I want to look at the heart.

And in these situations, angiogenesis is out of balance.

And these are the vessels of life, and as I'll show you, they can also be the vessels of death.

It's most likely due to small floating blood clots in the vessels around the eyes,demonstrating a C.V.I.

Whoa. Big hematoma.

And the processes that cause this are things like arteriosclerosis for the large vessels or arteriolosclerosis for the small vessels.

This is a heart stent developed by Zhong You at Oxford University.

So lets say you have your heart here and I'm going to stretch out the aorta. It doesn't normally look this way but I'm going to try and show you what it would look like in a person that has the ability to have nice flexible arteries.

Shut your mouth!

So the body has the ability to regulate the amount of blood vessels that are present at any given time.

And we're now studying the role of a healthy diet with Dean Ornish at UCSF and Tufts University the role of this healthy diet on markers of angiogenesis that we can find in the bloodstream.

And we can then tubularize this scaffold.

Because some of that pressure energy got taken away and stored as elastic energy.

Yet, without a blood supply, most of these cancers will never become dangerous.

If you had an acute congestive heart failure, they could bleed a pint of blood from you by opening up an arm vein, giving you a crude leaf preparation of digitalis and then giving you oxygen by tent.

Which, in fact, is not a vein at all, but the crustaceans intestinal tract.

like red blood cells.

(Laughter)

Subdural hematoma.