In an eight-year heyday in the 1990s at Immunex, the two men helped discover some of the most important new drug targets in decades, unearthing a family of immune-system genes.

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Kirsch says it's a common pattern in medicine to think a new drug has great benefits, only to discover years later that the apparent efficacy is mostly due to the placebo effect.

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He realized, five years before Harvard's Folkman would discover angiostatin, that blocking VEGF with a specially tailored drug might lead to a totally new type of cancer therapy.

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