Vascular amounts and dispersion of caliber-classified vessels as key parameters to quantitate 3D micro-angioarchitectures in multiple myeloma experimental tumors

Blood vessel micro-angioarchitecture plays a pivotal role in tumor progression, metastatic dissemination and response to therapy. Thus, methods able to quantify microvascular trees and their anomalies may allow a better comprehension of the neovascularization process and evaluation of vascular-targeted therapies in cancer. To this aim, the development of a restricted set of indexes able to describe the arrangement of a microvascular tree is eagerly required. We addressed this goal through 3D analysis of the functional microvascular network in sulfo-biotin-stained human multiple myeloma KMS-11 xenografts in NOD/SCID mice. Using image analysis, we show that amounts, spatial dispersion and spatial relationships of adjacent classes of caliber-filtered microvessels provide a near-linear graphical “fingerprint” of tumor micro-angioarchitecture. Position, slope and axial projections of this graphical outcome reflect biological features and summarize the properties of tumor micro-angioarchitecture. Notably, treatment of KMS-11 xenografts with anti-angiogenic drugs affected position and slope of the specific curves without degrading their near-linear properties. The possibility offered by this procedure to describe and quantify the 3D features of the tumor micro-angioarchitecture paves the way to the analysis of the microvascular tree in human tumor specimens at different stages of tumor progression and after pharmacologic interventions, with possible diagnostic and prognostic implications.