Notching up vascular regeneration.

Regenerative medicine for cardiovascular disease requires effective approaches for therapeutic revascularization. In a recent paper in Cell Research, Sahara et al. establish a new role for Notch signaling to promote endothelial progenitor differentiation, and develop a protocol based on Notch inhibition in endothelial progenitors to markedly enhance the yield and purity of functional endothelial cells differentiated from embryonic stem cells.