Dr. Judah Folkman, the Harvard surgeon who parlayed a chance observation into a bold and controversial new way to fight cancer and a host of other diseases, has died. He was 74.
Folkman was changing planes at the Denver airport on his way to a conference in Vancouver, Canada, when he died Monday of a heart attack, his family said.
Folkman reasoned that tumors could grow beyond a small size only if they stimulated the growth of new blood vessels to supply their cells with nutrients and oxygen, a process called angiogenesis. The logical outgrowth of that reasoning was that blocking the recruitment of new blood vessels could starve tumors into submission, converting cancer into a manageable, chronic disease.
His ideas were disparaged and even ridiculed for more than a quarter of a century before they became widely accepted during the late 1990s. Today, 10 cancer drugs -- including Avastin and Thalomid -- based on his ideas are on the market, at least 50 more are in testing and more than 1.2 million patients worldwide are receiving anti-angiogenic therapy.
Similar drugs, such as Macugen and Lucentis, are also being used to treat macular degeneration, arthritis and other diseases.
"The world has lost a bright light, but his contributions live on in the thousands of researchers he mentored, new treatments that his work spawned and patients for whom he always deeply cared and to whom he gave so deeply of his time and knowledge," said Dr. James Mandell, president and chief executive of Children's Hospital Boston, where Folkman spent most of his career.
Folkman's original inspiration came in the early 1960s, when he was a lieutenant serving at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. He and his colleague Frederick Becker removed the thyroid gland from a rabbit, kept it alive in a glass dish and injected it with cancer cells.
They observed that the tumor would grow only until it reached the size of a pinhead, at which point it contained about a million cells. When the researchers implanted the gland in a rabbit, however, the tumor quickly began growing until it killed the rabbit.
Folkman reasoned that once a tumor reached a certain size, nutrients could no longer diffuse through it to reach the innermost cells, and growth ceased. But placing it in an animal's body allowed new blood vessels to penetrate the tumor and provide sustenance.
