all Moses Judah Folkman stories

Capillary formation’s mechanical determinants

404132862 — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 11:14:04 -0400

Harvard researchers have established a link between the growth of blood vessels and the mechanical stresses caused by the environment within which the vessels grow, a new understanding that researchers hope can lead to novel disease treatments based on manipulating blood flow to living tissues.

M. Judah Folkman, biomedical pioneer, dies at 74

404132862 — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:55:01 -0500

One of Harvard Medical School’s (HMS) most forward-looking and innovative physician-scientists, M. Judah Folkman, died suddenly Monday (Jan. 14) after suffering a heart attack at the Denver International Airport in Denver. He was 74.

Blood vessel drugs halt cancer growth

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:20:58 -0400

After decades of surviving peer rejection of his theory of cancer treatment by blocking tiny blood vessels, Judah Folkman has gone on to develop drugs that did what he predicted they would do.

Folkman's endostatin, the drug Fortune magazine called a failure, was used to treat 486 patients with lung cancer in China. At Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, it has helped adult and pediatric cancer patients.

A related drug, called Avastin, is now used in 28 countries, including the U.S. It is also being tested on patients with kidney, breast, and ovarian cancers.

Folkman, a professor of pediatric surgery and cell biology at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital in Boston, came up with the idea that tumors secrete proteins able to stimulate the growth of hair-thin blood vessels that bring them nutrients and carry away their wastes in 1961, while studying mice. He applied the name "angiogenesis," meaning "birth of blood vessels," to this process.

By 1997, Folkman and his colleagues at Boston's Children's Hospital found a natural compound they called endostatin, which blocks the growth of blood vessels and shrinks tumors without the usual harsh side effects of chemotherapy.

The battle over endostatin's efficacy as a drug, however, still rages, but Avastin enjoys good press, suggesting that the angiogenesis-blocker boom is on.

Many have 'cancer,' but few progress to true disease

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 07:10:20 -0400

Folkman and Kalluri suggest that most tumors don't develop a blood supply that allows them to grow and progress to cancer, because people produce natural inhibitors of blood vessel growth, or angiogenesis. They write that a better understanding of these inhibitors may yield a new generation of nontoxic anticancer drugs that could be given preventively to people at high risk for developing the disease.

The essay cites autopsy studies revealing that more than a third of women aged 40 to 50 have small breast carcinomas, whereas only 1 percent are diagnosed with clinical breast cancer. Analagous findings hold for prostate cancer in men. Similarly, autopsies show that virtually all people aged 50 to 70 have small thyroid tumors, yet well below 1 percent are diagnosed with clinical thyroid cancer.

Folkman and Kalluri describe two phases of cancer, the first of which isn't inherently lethal and where genetic mutations develop that transform normal cells in the body into cancerous cells. The second phase involves the dominance of growth factors secreted by a tumor to attract a blood supply over the defense provided by natural angiogenesis inhibitors.

A major current focus of Folkman's Vascular Biology Program at Children's Hospital Boston is on predicting the 'angiogenic switch' and delaying or preventing it with natural angiogenesis inhibitors. Preventive therapy could be offered to people with a genetically increased risk for cancer, people with a family history of cancer, and people whose cancer has been treated but may recur.

Researchers explain how protein inhibits growth of blood vessels

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:16:41 -0400

Thirty years ago, Judah Folkman, of Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, first developed the idea that cancerous tumors are dependent on the growth of small blood vessels. Since then, Folkman and other researchers have sought a way to block the growth of cancer tumors through restricting or eliminating the small blood vessels that feed them. A new discovery made by a team of researchers working at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston offers one of the first explanations for how angiogenesis – the medical term for the growth of small blood vessels – is inhibited in the body. The study focuses on a protein called tumstatin. Senior author Raghu Kalluri is a researcher in the Department of Medicine and the Program in Matrix Biology at BIDMC and associate professor at Harvard Medical School. The study appeared in the Jan. 4, 2002, issue of Science. “This is a very important advance in the fields of angiogenesis research and cancer biology,” said Folkman. The study was supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and research funds from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.