What you need to know about VEGF-C when trying to grow lymphatics for the treatment of lymphedema

What is it about?

Although already known for more than 20 years, many of the properties of VEGF-C have only recently been recognized. E.g. the fact, that pro-VEGF-C is a competitive antagonist of mature VEGF-C and that VEGF-C interacts with ECM and cell surfaces via its silk-homology domain, which is absent from mature VEGF-C. So far, the vast majority of publications that detect VEGF-C have failed to differentiate between pro-VEGF-C and mature VEGF-C. Hence, the interpretation of such descriptive studies should take our recent knowledge into account. Similarly, the use of VEGF-A in lymphatic engineering is discouraged because of many indicators showing that it might not be the optimal growth factor for this task.

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Why is it important?

We realized that many recent publications still cite 15 to 20-year-old review articles when they are referencing VEGF-C. Hence, we decided to write a small review to collect the most important progress from the last 5 years which is necessary to reinterpret older studies.