Vascular Remodelling in Health and Disease

The growth and subsequent remodelling of blood vessels is essential for normal development and also occurs in a variety of pathological conditions. In the female reproductive tract these processes occur in a regular and carefully orchestrated manner. The endothelial cells interact with neighbouring cells and this dialogue is mediated by cell to cell contact, paracrine and sometime autocrine factors. In this presentation I shall describe how pericytes which are closely associated with capillaries are involved in the response of placental vasculature to growth under reduced oxygen conditions in vivo; how endothelial proliferation and behaviour can be altered by interactions with other cell types in vitro and in vivo and finally, using a conditional knockout approach how autocrine factors regulate endothelial cell survival and vascular development in the mouse.