APLNR and ischemic stroke: In addition, PI3K/AKT and ERKs signaling pathways play a crucial role in apelin/APLNR-induced angiogenesis in ischemic stroke, which may be mediated by VEGF-VEGFR2 (Wang et al., 2013; Chen et al., 2015; Liu et al., 2015; Novakova et al., 2016).