Judah Folkman

Judah Folkman proposed and championed the hypothesis that tumor growth beyond a small size requires new blood vessel formation (angiogenesis), a concept initially met with skepticism but ultimately validated and translated into anti-angiogenic therapies including bevacizumab. His decades of work at Boston Children's Hospital established tumor angiogenesis as a fundamental hallmark of cancer and identified VEGF as a key mediator, laying the intellectual foundation for one of the most widely used classes of cancer drugs. He died in 2008 and his work was recognized as among the most influential in cancer biology.