In an eight-year heyday in the 1990s at Immunex, the two men helped discover some of the most important newdrug targets in decades, unearthing a family of immune-system genes.
Kirsch says it's a common pattern in medicine to think a newdrug has great benefits, only to discover years later that the apparent efficacy is mostly due to the placebo effect.
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.