Judah Folkman

Born in 1933 in Cleveland, Ohio, Judah Folkman accompanied his father, a rabbi of Austrian-Jewish descent, on visits to hospital patients. By age seven, he knew he wanted to be a doctor rather than follow in his father's footsteps, so he could offer cures in addition to comfort. His father replied, "In that case, you can be a rabbi-like doctor," words his son took to heart. Folkman graduated from Ohio State University in 1953, and then Harvard Medical School in 1957. While a student at Harvard Medical School, he trained under Robert Edward Gross and also worked on a prototype pacemaker, work that he never published. In 1960, his residency was interrupted when he was drafted in the United States Navy and did research for the Navy until 1962 at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. During that time, he studied the use of silastic for the sustained release of lipophilic drugs; the 1964 publication of that work helped inspire the technological development of the Norplant implantable contraceptive at the Population Council. The navy research was focused on developing artificial blood; in the course of testing potential products to see if they could keep alive thymus glands taken from rabbits, he noticed that tumors in the gland could not grow as they did if the glands were perfused with blood. His curiosity as to why led to his work on angiogenesis. After his two years work for the navy, Folkman completed his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. He worked as an assistant surgeon at Boston City Hospital, then trained further in pediatric surgery at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia under C. Everett Koop. ==Career==

In 1967 he was appointed surgeon-in-chief of Children's Hospital Boston at the age of 34. Folkman was appointed the Julia Dyckman Andrus Professor of Pediatric Surgery at Harvard Medical School in 1968, where he was also Professor of Cell Biology. He was the youngest full Professor in the history of Harvard Medical School. He hypothesized that there was an unknown "factor" that tumors secreted to help it increase its blood supply, and that if that factor could be blocked, tumors would wither and die. Though his hypothesis was initially disregarded and treated with skepticism by most experts in the field, Folkman persisted with his research. In these trials they also studied the levels of fibroblast growth factor in the urine of the trial subjects and published that work in 1994; these were some of the first explorations of the use of biomarkers in clinical trials as surrogate endpoints. In 1991 Michael O"Reilly, working in the Folkman lab with Entremed funding, discovered the first endogenous angiogenesis inhibitor, angiostatin and then another, endostatin. Entremed began developing them and soon struck a collaboration with Bristol-Myers, which caught national interest and spurred further investment in angiogenesis inhibitors by other pharma companies. In 1993 he surprised the scientific world by hypothesizing that angiogenesis is as important in blood cancers as it is in solid tumors, and the next year he published work showing that a biomarker of angiogenesis was higher in all people with cancer, but especially high in people with blood cancers, and other evidence of the role of angiogenesis in blood cancers emerged as well. Around that time, the wife of a man who was dying of multiple myeloma and whom standard treatments had failed, called Folkman asking him about his anti-angiogenesis ideas. In 2004, the first angiogenesis inhibitor, bevacizumab (Avastin), was approved by the FDA, as a treatment for colon cancer. It is a recombinant humanized monoclonal antibody that was discovered and developed by Napoleone Ferrara, a scientist at Genentech. A similar drug, Lucentis, was later approved for treating macular degeneration. ==Awards==

Folkman was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, among others. He was the author of some 400 papers and more than 100 book chapters and monographs and received scores of United States awards and honors for his research as well as numerous international awards, including the George Ledlie Prize from Harvard, Canada's Gairdner Foundation International Award, Israel's Wolf Prize, Germany's Ernst Schering Prize, the United Kingdom Society for Endocrinology's Dale Medal in 2000, Prince of Asturias Award, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement and Switzerland's Dr. Josef Steiner Cancer Research Award. In 2005 he was awarded the Scientific Grand Prize of the Lefoulon-Delalande Foundation. He was awarded the Massry Prize from the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California in 1997. On May 29, 1998, Folkman received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Medicine at Uppsala University, Sweden ==Death and legacy==

Folkman died of a heart attack in Denver on January 14, 2008, at the age of 74 en route to deliver the 2008 Keynote Address at the Keystone Symposia (Molecular Mechanisms of Angiogenesis in Development and Disease) in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was survived by his wife, Paula, whom he met and married while doing his surgical residency, two daughters, and a granddaughter. == Further reading ==