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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.
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.
| Title | Journal | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Angiogenesis in cancer, vascular, rheumatoid and other disease | Nature Medicine | 1995 |
| Induction of angiogenesis during the transition from hyperplasia to neoplasia | Nature | 1989 |
| Role of angiogenesis in tumor growth and metastasis | Seminars in Oncology | 2002 |
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