As a tumor proliferates, it rapidly outgrows its blood supply, creating an oxygen-starved environment that suppresses the canonical pathway of protein synthesis. Despite shutting down the general mechanism for initiating protein synthesis, the tumor continues to translate a subset of mRNAs that are involved in tumor survival and angiogenesis. It has been proposed that these pro-angiogenic mRNAs have highly stable structures in their 5’ untranslated region called cap-independent translation enhancer regions (CITEs) that facilitate a putative switch to turn on a non-canonical pathway of protein synthesis. Using single molecule fluorescence microscopy, I hope to understand how the properties of mRNAs that promote tumor angiogenesis facilitate a non-canonical pathway for translation initiation.