It has been reported that HIF-1 play an important role in vascular remodeling at sites of intestinal injury and inflammation of IBD, by regulating angiogenic genes such as VEGF (Feinman et al., 2010; Bakirtzi et al., 2014), a major paracrine growth factor involved in blood vessel development, which has been unregulated in active UC and UC-associated cancer (Tolstanova et al., 2009). Here, VEGFA is linked to cancer.