On January 14th of this year, the biomedical research community lost Judah Folkman, the father of angiogenesis research. Folkman's warm and humble personality, inspirational teaching, unlimited creativity, and vast clinical experience have been described elsewhere (1). Here, we focus on Folkman's ineffaceable scientific achievements in angiogenesis research, which revolutionized biomedical research and clinical drug development.rnFolkman founded an entirely new field of basic and clinical research and discovered a previously unknown family of angiogenesis regulatory molecules. He showed experimentally how these molecules provide a fundamental mechanism that controls the growth of virtually all tumors. He showed that expansion of tissue mass, whether neoplastic or nonneoplastic, critically depends on continuous endothelial replication and neovascularization.
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