By Mark Hollmer (Boston Business Journal) -- A pioneer in cancer research has died. Dr. Judah Folkman first theorized and later proved that tumors were dependent on blood vessels for survival, and that tumors could be prevented from growing further and even shrunk by cutting off their blood supplies. The 74-year-old director of vascular biology at Children’s Hospital Boston died Monday of an apparent heart attack, according to media reports. “The hospital and the world have lost a bright light,” Children’s Hospital president and CEO Dr. James Mandell said of Folkman’s loss in a memo to employees, staff and volunteers Tuesday morning.
Quiet by nature and a surgeon by training, Folkman traded the operating theater for the laboratory in large part to pursue his theory on tumors and blood supplies.
He would revolutionize cancer research. He published a significant paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1971 that proposed his initial hypothesis that doctors could fight tumors by cutting off their blood supply. This later formed the basis of the field known as angiogenesis research.
Pharmaceutical companies have pursued new anti-cancer drugs based on the concept known as angiogenesis inhibitors. They’re approved today in the U.S. and 27 other countries, according to Children’s Hospital.
Folkman in his lifetime authored 389 original peer-reviewed papers. He’s been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
