VEGFA and diabetes mellitus: This is also reflected in mice modelling features of DR: chemically-induced diabetes leads to a significant and progressive increase of Gal-1 levels in retinal tissue (Kanda et al., 2017); both VEGF and Gal-1 are strongly upregulated in neovascular tufts in oxygen-induced retinopathy (OIR), a model of neovascular induction in response to relative hypoxia (Ridano et al., 2017).