- Person
- Judah Folkman
- Lived
- 1933–2008
- Field
- Cancer research, surgery
- From
- American
The story
In the early 1960s Judah Folkman, a young surgeon drafted into the US Navy, was testing blood substitutes by pumping them through rabbit glands kept alive outside the body. When tumour cells were implanted in the glands, the tumours grew to a tiny size and stopped. Put back into living animals, they started growing again. Folkman concluded that the difference was blood supply: a tumour needs to recruit new blood vessels to grow.
In 1971, by then surgeon-in-chief at Children’s Hospital Boston, he set out the hypothesis in the New England Journal of Medicine. Solid tumours, he argued, release a signal that triggers angiogenesis, the growth of new vessels, and if that signal could be blocked, tumours would be starved. Most cancer researchers, focused on killing cancer cells directly, dismissed the idea. His grant applications were rejected as too visionary and journals were reluctant to publish him, but he persisted for two decades.
The evidence accumulated. Other laboratories, inspired by his work, identified the main signal, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). His own team found natural angiogenesis inhibitors, angiostatin and endostatin, and a colleague in his laboratory discovered in 1994 that thalidomide blocks angiogenesis; a trial Folkman helped set in motion showed that it worked against multiple myeloma. In 2004 the US Food and Drug Administration approved bevacizumab (Avastin), an antibody against VEGF, for advanced colon cancer, and it was later approved for other cancers.
The idea proved even more powerful in the eye. In wet age-related macular degeneration, abnormal blood vessels grow beneath the retina and destroy central vision. Anti-VEGF drugs such as ranibizumab (Lucentis), a relative of Avastin, now block that growth and help preserve sight. When Folkman died in 2008, the Associated Press reported that his research had led to ten cancer drugs used by more than 1.2 million patients. Characteristically, he had refused to promise a cure: such drugs, he wrote in 1998, would make cancer more survivable and controllable.
Why it matters
Anti-angiogenesis drugs that grew from Folkman’s idea now treat several cancers and help preserve the sight of people with wet macular degeneration.
About Judah Folkman
A rabbi’s son and children’s surgeon who found that tumours need new blood vessels to grow, founding the field behind cancer drugs like Avastin and sight-saving eye treatments.
Sources
- Physician-Scientist Judah Folkman, MD, Faced Years of Skepticism The ASCO Post
- Judah Folkman, 74, pioneering cancer researcher Associated Press via Philadelphia Inquirer
- Judah Folkman Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.