Dr. Moses Judah Folkman with Dean Joan Herbers

We are honored to claim Dr. Moses Judah Folkman, one of Ohio State's most distinguished graduates, as an alumnus of the College of Biological Sciences. Folkman (B.S., biological sciences, 1953) is this year's recipient of the OSU Alumni Association's highest honor, the Alumni Medalist Award.

Folkman, Professor of Pediatric Surgery, Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, and Director of the Surgical Research Laboratory at Children's Hospital, Boston, has become a legend in his own time and been hailed internationally for blazing new trails in cancer research.

Long before this research became front-page news in The New York Times and elsewhere, Folkman's reputation in the medical world was well-established. He developed the first implantable atrio-ventricular pacemaker while still a medical student at Harvard and pioneered the first implantable polymers for the slow, sustained release of drugs.

But for 40 years, Folkman has worked relentlessly to unmask the secret of cancer growth. As a surgeon in the US Navy, he noticed the odd relationship between tumors and blood vessels. Tumors had an excessive number of blood vessels feeding into them, which led Folkman to believe they might secrete a substance allowing them to "recruit" or grow blood vessels to feed them. He called his new theory angiogenesis, or, "new blood vessel growth," a revolutionary new idea that seemed ludicrous to most scientists, who were even more critical when Folkman suggested cancer might be treated by checking this process through well-targeted drugs.

Today, few doubt that Folkman created a powerful new field of medicine with thousands of researchers working in an area where once he toiled alone.

Folkman's breakthrough offers the opportunity to manage cancer as a chronic rather than fatal disease and offers hope for thousands of cancer patients for whom there is no other hope.

C. Everett Koop, former Surgeon General of the United States, has said of Folkman, "When the history of medicine is written it will be a story of a tremendous impact that was at first pooh-poohed by colleagues and at the end proven to be what he said it would be and have a real, honest to goodness practical value in the lives of patients."

In his search to find a way to prove the validity of angiogenesis, Folkman performed a pivotal experiment that began changing minds, putting a tiny piece of tumor in the middle of a rabbit cornea-normally containing no blood vessels. After a few days, blood vessels emerged from the limbus ringing the eye and headed straight toward the tumor as if drawn by a magnet. Within two weeks the tumor had grown to 16,000 times its original size. When he removed the tumor, the blood vessels retreated and disappeared.

The next challenge was to find the molecule that triggers this process. After 10 years of screening and testing molecules, the elusive molecule was discovered.

Now, his lab began the search for angiogenesis inhibitors, which took years. Finally, they found two potent substances, angiostatin and endostatin, which had dramatic effects in mice-significantly shrinking tumors in 100 percent of treated mice, while tumors continued to spread in 100 percent of the untreated mice.

Angiostatin and endostatin and almost two dozen other new drugs are now in clinical trials. While the success of these trials will take some time to assess, it seems clear that these drugs hold real promise.

If these trials continue to show that these drugs work, it will profoundly change the way we treat cancer. Folkman's breakthrough offers the opportunity to manage cancer as a chronic rather than fatal disease and offers hope for thousands of cancer patients for whom there is no other hope.

Known and revered throughout the world for perseverance in the face of criticism, selfless dedication to research and breakthrough discoveries offering true hope for the way we treat and manage cancer, Folkman is a true hero of modern medicine.

-S.R.

A Rare Opportunity... In the spirit of enhancing the undergraduate learning experience, we were pleased to be able to provide several of our outstanding undergraduate students the exciting opportunity to meet and talk with Dr. Folkman at a reception in his honor hosted by the Dean's Office, prior to the Alumni Awards banquet. This informal event allowed each student to discuss his or her research project with Dr. Folkman, whose attentiveness, courtesy and humor, soon had everyone at ease. His genuine interest and appreciation of their work, coupled with his valuable input and advice, made this an experience these young researchers will long remember. Attending were Julie Richey, Marla Hassink, Mark Troyer, Ann Singer, Deanna Cettomai, Katrina Johnson, Autumn White, Sam Lasse, Michael Cheich and Elaine Halter.