Reply to Kerbel et al. : EPCs are again claimed to be essential in yet other models despite the irreproducibility of the original experiments introducing them

We conducted a study in which evidence for the existence of bone marrow (BM)-derived EPCs was not found in multiple physiologically relevant settings including cancer growth, suggesting such cells to be artifactual rather than physiological (1). Kerbel et al. (2) have now raised points that we believe are all factually incorrect or misleading. (i) We earlier demonstrated VEGFR-3+ progenitors …