VEGFA and Stroke: VEGF along with its receptors 1 and 2 are transcriptionally upregulated following stroke (Hayashi et al., 1997; Issa et al., 1999; Plate et al., 1999; Marti et al., 2000; Hai et al., 2003; Stowe et al., 2007, 2008) in a long-lasting fashion (Zhang et al., 2002), through the stabilization and subsequent binding of hypoxia-inducible factor 1 (HIF-1) to the hypoxia response element sequence in their promoters (Forsythe et al., 1996).