By William J. Cromie

Gazette Staff

Two Medical School scientists won $100,000 each and gold medals for their contributions to understanding the causes of cancer and its treatment.

Judah Folkman, Julia Dyckman Andrus Professor of Pediatric Surgery, and Herman Suit, Andres Soriano Professor of Radiation Oncology, shared the $300,000 General Motors Cancer Research award with Paul M. Nurse of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London, England. The award was presented last night at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Folkman, who works at Children's Hospital, won the Charles S. Mott medal for discovering how to deprive tumors of blood vessels they need to bring them nourishment. Drugs to shrink and kill tumors this way are now being tested all over the United States.

Suit, who practices at Massachusetts General Hospital, received the Charles F. Kettering medal for showing that amputation of cancerous limbs can be avoided by treatment with surgery and radiation.

Nurse was honored with the Alfred P. Sloan medal for work on enzymes responsible for the uncontrolled growth of cancer cells.

Eradicating Tumors

Folkman surprised the medical community in the early 1970s with the idea that tumors initiate growth of their own small blood vessels which allows them to become larger and invade nearby tissues. At first, this idea was greeted with skepticism, even ridicule.

For more than 20 years, Folkman and his colleagues and students doggedly pursued research that eventually proved that he was right. He showed that tumors secrete chemicals that not only trigger blood vessel growth, but can also stop that growth.

"Such growth-inhibiting proteins grow naturally in the body and are among the most potent anticancer drugs ever found," Folkman says. Other drugs shrink tumors, but these inhibitors eliminated them in animal experiments.

Cancer cells eventually develop resistance to most drugs, but not, so far, to the inhibitors. One of the latter, called TNP-470, is now being tested in humans.

"Patients can stay on TNP-470 for a long time without dangerous side-effects," Folkman says. "Some of them are now starting their third year without resistance, and their tumors seem to stay dormant."

While Folkman did experiments on tumor growth, Suit was saving the arms and legs of patients with cancer of the blood vessels, cartilage, and other connective tissues. Before 1960, most malignant tumors of this type were treated by amputating the limb. Suit's research showed that a combination of removing the tumor surgically and radiation treatment worked as well as amputation and vastly improved a patient's quality of life.

"In some cases, giving preoperative radiation may mean that a patient needs less extensive surgery," says Suit, who is also chief of radiation oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital. For those with large, aggressive tumors, chemotherapy and radiation given before surgery "seems to increase the survival rate, without subsequent spreading of the cancer, from 40 to 70 percent."