Southeast Asians remember very well that as a child when one got hurt, the first thing Mom would apply to the wound was the "golden spice," Curcuma longa (also called turmeric or haldi). This cooking spice contains curcumin, which gives the spice its yellow color. Thus, it is no surprise that the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson added turmeric to Band-Aids to enhance wound healing (Fig. 1). In 1996, a study from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD, USA was the first to report that curcumin heals by affecting angiogenesis, the growth of new blood vessels from preexisting ones. Since then, numerous groups have shown that curcumin modulates angiogenesis both in vitro and in vivo. In this commentary, we will discuss how curcumin affects pathological angiogenesisincluding that described by Chen and colleagues.
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