Therapeutic angiogenesis: From conventional approaches to recent nanotechnology-based interventions

Highlights: • Importance of therapeutic angiogeneis has been detailed. • Therapeutic angiogenesis is a promising approach in the treatment of ischemic disease and chronic wounds. • Conventional approaches like VEGF application and cell-based approaches provided significant progress. • Use of various nanoparticles is a novel approach in therapeutic angiogenesis. • Clinical translation of recent angiogenesis approaches still needs a lot of validations. -- Abstract: Intentional and regulated induction of blood vessels formation which is generally referred to as therapeutic angiogenesis has a lot of potential in the management of various kinds of ischemic complications as well as in wound healing, bone regeneration and tissue engineering. Conventionally, therapeutic angiogenesis relies on the controlled application of growth factors that helps to initiate the formation of blood vessels in the target tissues and bioengineered constructs. The emergence of nanotechnology in medicine, particularly its application in molecular medicine has the potential for a tremendous progress in the therapeutic angiogenesis interventions. Although a good number of systems, which include growth factor delivery, use of gene therapeutic agents, and nanomaterials, are in experimental or preclinical phase, there is a huge potential for them in the clinical implication in upcoming years. In this article, we review the main advances of therapeutic angiogenesis over the past few years, explore the application prospects and discuss about the principles, approaches, importance and challenges with the aim of facilitating its clinical translation in near future.