Dr. Folkman’s Influence on Modern Medicine

chillibreeze writer — Arpita Mukhopadhyay

On the day Dr. Moses Judah Folkman (February 1933-January 2008) passed away, he was the founder and director of the Vascular Biology Program at Children’s Hospital, Boston and Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. His early contributions to the medical technology field include the development of one of the first implantable heart pacemakers when he was a student at Harvard Medical School. While working as a lieutenant in the US Navy, he developed an implantable device for timed release of drugs. Now known as Norplant and used for birth control, he had donated it patent-free to the World Population Council.

In an influential paper in New England Journal of Medicine in 1971, he proposed the pioneering idea that blocking blood supply to a tumor would lead to its recession. This was the first time anyone had proposed blocking new blood vessel growth (anti-angiogenesis) as a cancer-fighting strategy. Years of painstaking work by Folkman’s lab subsequently led to the identification of various angiogenesis inhibitors like angiostatin, endostatin and vasculostatin. Based on the principles of angiogenesis inhibition, Avastin was the first drug to be approved by FDA in 2004 for fighting colorectal cancer. Many other such drugs are now in clinical trials and scores of labs all over the world are engaged in angiogenesis research.

A story in the front page of the Sunday New York Times in May 1998 brought Judah Folkman’s research firmly into the limelight. Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of DNA structure James Watson commented in that article, “Judah is going to cure cancer in two years.” In spite of that comment sounding precocious then, Judah Folkman has taken us enormously close to converting cancer into a manageable chronic disease like diabetes.

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Arpita says, "I am a biomedical scientist with a passion for writing. Writing about science and technology and their clinical applications is my constant endeavor. I believe in being able to communicate both to the scientific community at large and to the aficionados of 'popular science'."

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