# Judah Folkman

Source: https://onco.cc/people/judah-folkman/  
OnCo record `judah-folkman` (Person). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

In 1971 he proposed that tumours cannot grow beyond a few millimetres without recruiting blood vessels, and that blocking them could treat cancer. Dismissed for decades, the idea produced bevacizumab and a class of drugs.

## Summary

Judah Folkman (1933-2008) was a paediatric surgeon at Boston Children's Hospital when, in a 1971 New England Journal of Medicine paper, he proposed that solid tumours are angiogenesis-dependent, secreting factors that recruit new blood vessels, and that anti-angiogenesis could be a form of therapy. The hypothesis was met with scepticism, grant rejections and ridicule for much of two decades while his laboratory isolated the first angiogenic factors and inhibitors, including angiostatin and endostatin. The identification of VEGF by Napoleone Ferrara at Genentech and the approval of the anti-VEGF antibody bevacizumab for colorectal cancer in 2004 confirmed the principle, and anti-angiogenic drugs are now standard in kidney, liver, lung, colorectal and other cancers, as well as in eye disease. He trained many of the field's leaders and died suddenly in 2008.

## Fields

- Kind: Person
- Last checked: 2026-09-09
- Tags: hero; pioneer
- Role: Surgeon-scientist who proposed and proved that tumours depend on new blood vessels
- Specialisms: Angiogenesis; Tumour biology; Anti-angiogenic therapy

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_Folkman
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_Folkman
- Boston Children's Hospital: https://www.childrenshospital.org/

## Connected records

- fronts: [Targeted Therapy](https://onco.cc/fronts/targeted-therapy/)
- technologies: [Anti-angiogenic therapy](https://onco.cc/technologies/antiangiogenic/)
- targets: [VEGF / VEGFR](https://onco.cc/targets/vegf/)
- drugs: [Bevacizumab](https://onco.cc/drugs/bevacizumab/)
- terms: [Hallmark: inducing or accessing vasculature](https://onco.cc/terms/inducing-angiogenesis/), [Hallmarks of Cancer](https://onco.cc/terms/hallmarks-of-cancer/), [Microenvironment and inflammation: tumours as wounds that do not heal](https://onco.cc/terms/microenvironment-inflammation-theory/)
- bottlenecks: [Funding follows fashion, not burden](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-funding-allocation/), [The valley of death between lab and product](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-translational-valley/)
- journals: [Seminars in oncology](https://onco.cc/journals/seminars-in-oncology/)

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