One Man's Quest To Cure Cancer

For years, researcher Judah Folkman was scorned by peers. Last week he became famous--for a breakthrough that may, or may not, help conquer our most-feared killer.

IN HIS GOLD WIRE-RIMMED glasses and white lab coat, Dr. Moses Judah Folkman doesn't look anything like a man in the eye of a media storm. Leaning forward in the conference-room chair on the 10th floor of Boston's Children's Hospital, Folkman is deep in earnest conversation about his long-scorned theory of cancer when his beeper goes off. CBS is asking him to appear on the evening news. Folkman, 65, politely excuses himself and, returning the call, declines--as he has most of the 2,000 other interview requests that flooded in last week. This was Folkman's moment, his chance for the cliched 15 minutes of fame, for seven-figure book deals and glowing newspaper profiles. And he was having none of it. An intensely private man, Folkman blew off Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel, refused TV offers from Australia and Israel and France and Italy, canceled a long-scheduled speech before a prostate-cancer group to avoid paparazzi--and wished the whole thing had never happened. ""We were just minding our own business,'' he says in bemusement.

But a front-page story in The New York Times last week described Folkman's years-old discovery of a cancer treatment as so promising that it might ""cure cancer in two years,'' as James Watson, Nobel laureate and the codiscoverer of DNA, was quoted as saying. The article became the media equivalent of a virulent flu. It infected television broadcasts, newspapers, magazines and radio with the idea that researchers could actually cure the disease that Americans fear more than any other. Desperate patients flooded help lines, Internet chat rooms, hospitals and doctors' offices with questions and pleas for the drugs, and many angrily asked why they had to stay on toxic chemotherapy if a benign and effective therapy was available. Where patients saw hope, investors saw gold: even before the stock market's opening bell Monday they had placed thousands of ""buy'' orders for shares of EntreMed Inc., the Rockville, Md., company with the patent rights to Folkman's two anti-cancer compounds. The stock price roller-coastered from $12 to $85 and back down to $52. For a few days, the word angiogenesis was more ubiquitous than the name Lewinsky.

Then came the backlash. By midweek, editorials and op-ed pieces were emphasizing that while the two drugs discovered by Folkman's lab--endostatin and angiostatin--had cured a bunch of mice, they had helped exactly zero humans. And then the Times story, whose front-page placement belied the fact that it contained little that had not been reported already, itself became The Story. Jim Watson denied his hyperbolic ""cure cancer'' quote. Rival newspapers published accusations that reporter Gina Kolata's story was an attempt to stir up interest in, and get more money for, a book she was shopping around. Within a day her agent withdrew the proposal ""after [Kolata's] discussion with her editors after the difficulties became clear of staying with the story after she acquired a financial stake in it.'' (In fact, Kolata's book proposal came after, not before, her article.)

If last week demonstrated anything, it was that hope is long but memory is short when it comes to ""cures'' for cancer. In 1983, the renowned biologist Lewis Thomas foresaw ""the end of cancer before this century is over.'' Yes, angiostatin and endostatin, which tame tumors by preventing the growth of blood vessels that feed them, had successfully treated mice. And other anti-angiogenesis agents have even shrunk tumors in human trials. But the history of cancer treatment is full of shooting stars, experimental treatments that have glowed with the promise of ultimate success only to crash and burn. Taxol, interferon, interleukin-2--oncologists still prescribe them. Some patients live because of them; others die despite them. ""I know this as well as everybody else,'' says Folkman. Even in his boldest dreams he does not expect anti-angiogenesis agents to slay cancer on their own. But he also thinks that, for some people, they could mean the difference between surviving with a tumor and dying because of it, and he has thought so through decades of snickers and hostile silence.

Folkman's first lightbulb-above-the-head moment came in 1960, when he was all of 27. Drafted by the Navy, he was assigned to the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., where he studied blood substitutes. One day he injected cancer cells into a rabbit thyroid gland that was being kept alive in a blood-free solution inside a corked glass chamber. Tiny melanomas sprouted. But they never grew larger than a pencil tip. ""That was the first time we saw that, in the absence of blood vessels, there was no tumor growth,'' Folkman recalled last week as he point- ed to the old glass tube in a display case. He and colleague Frederick Becker published their observations. But they didn't present their truly radical idea: that tumors, in order to grow, need to hook up to blood vessels.