Ezio Merler coauthored the 1971 study of angiogenic activity isolated from tumours, alongside Judah Folkman, Charles Abernathy and Gretchen Williams.[ref]
Isolation of a Tumor Factor Responsible for Angiogenesis by Judah Folkman and others. Byline and Abstract
The investigators coupled biochemical separation with a biological response, asking whether separated material could induce new capillaries.This is the logic of bioassay-guided fractionation: a fraction is interesting because a reproducible biological effect follows it through the separation procedure. An active fraction need not be a single pure molecule. The historical preparation should therefore not be identified retrospectively with vascular endothelial growth factor merely because both concern angiogenesis.
An original example distinguishes recovery from enrichment. Suppose a starting extract contains 100 arbitrary units of angiogenic activity in 20 milligrams of protein. Its activity per milligram is . A later fraction contains 40 units in 2 milligrams, giving units per milligram. The process has achieved fourfold enrichment with 40 percent activity recovery. Neither number establishes chemical purity. Here the activity units are assumed additive for illustration; an ordinal visual score cannot automatically be treated as an additive biochemical quantity.
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