You are in Living Better . When The New York Times ran a front-page story in May 1998, Harvard professor M. Judah Folkman, MD, and his work with experimental cancer drugs quickly became the hope of the future. And the tumors starved.
Angiogenesis is the body's process of making new blood vessels.
Cancers need new blood vessels in order to grow and spread. But drugs that block the formation of these new blood vessels can cut off the tumors' blood supply - hopefully killing them. Without new blood vessels, tumors can't grow past pinhead size, he explains. So Folkman, a professor of pediatric surgery at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues essentially cured the mice's cancer. Now, almost two years later, nearly 20 of these drugs are in human trials and about five of them are in the final stage of human testing, Folkman said Tuesday at a lecture at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York.