By Justin Gillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 27, 2004

The Food and Drug Administration yesterday approved Avastin, the first drug to battle cancers by blocking their blood supply, vindicating a 40-year-old medical theory once ridiculed as absurd.

Doctors said the drug was not a cure for colon cancer, the disease it was approved to treat, but they welcomed it as progress toward their long-range goal of turning cancer into a manageable illness. Avastin blocks the action of a protein that growing tumors send out that orders the body to sprout new blood vessels to supply the malignant cells with nutrients. Without a blood supply, solid tumors do not grow.

"This is a milestone, and it may be a turning point for cancer, because of the lowered side effects" seen with Avastin and similar drugs under development, said Judah Folkman, the Harvard Medical School researcher who pioneered the blood-vessel theory as a young Navy doctor in Washington in the early 1960s. "Can you convert cancer to a chronic, manageable disease, like Vice President Cheney's heart disease? When I was in medical school, that was unheard of."