This text contains a diverse array of chapters, 31 in total, covering the area of anti-angiogenic agents and their role in cancer therapy. With the recent approval of drugs such as Avastin (a humanised antibody to vascular endothelial growth factor), this field has gained prominence as a new therapeutic approach for cancer. Combined with these developments, a renewed interest in basic vessel biology has revealed potentially new targets such as lymphatic vessels, endothelial precursors and stem cell populations.
Anti-angiogenic Agents in Cancer Therapy is segmented into three areas dealing with the basic biology of angiogenesis, translational research and the application of anti-angiogenic therapy in clinical trials. While this introduces some repetition in the book, as each individual chapter tends to reintroduce certain facts and definitions, it is by no means a major problem and does mean that almost any chapter can be read easily in isolation. Although some of the chapters are relatively short, the book as a whole works well as it has an extensive index which allows key words or phrases to be easily identified in the body of the text. In this way it acts very much as a reference book, to identify important facts, experiments or trials within the individual topics and to provide illustrative references for further reading.
The text should appeal to cancer researchers and students in the area of anti-angiogenic therapy. In particular, it will aid the clinically qualified researchers and oncologists who want to have a broad reference text in this area. Importantly, the book provides information on a number of different cancers, including a good summary of the basic biology in the area and a future perspective on where translational research is heading. A thorough reading of the book will provide a foundation for understanding the general area, which could then be further built on through the scientific and medical journals.
Overall the structure of the book works well. It combines a variety of relatively short chapters focused on the theme of anti-angiogenic therapy with a selection of illustrative figures. The quality of the author list and the effective indexing makes it a valuable and functional text.