The vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) therapy race has new contenders and this race may eventually prove to be as exciting as the Tour de France, particularly for those affected by the growing epidemic of wet macular degeneration.

The expensive pharmaceutical based anti-angiogenic therapies, like Macugen, marketed by Pfizer, and Lucentis, marketed by Novartis, may eventually race eye to eye with relatively inexpensive nutrients that are now suggested to inhibit activation of genes that stimulate VEGF, thus preventing wet macular degeneration instead of treating it after the fact.

As far back as the year 2000, the science journal Nature published a study suggesting that our VEGF genes are switched on when they are deprived of specific antioxidant nutrients. VEGF stimulates the elongation, network formation, and branching of endothelial cells. This leads to what we used to call neovascularization (now referred to as angiogenesis), the process by which new blood vessels develop to carry nutrients to nutrient deficient retinas and tumors. When these new blood vessels are formed to feed the retina they tend to be fragile and can easily leak, causing wet macula degeneration and vision loss.