Ludwig Lausanne’s Douglas Hanahan received the 2025 Pezcoller Foundation-AACR International Award for Extraordinary Achievement in Cancer Research. This prestigious award recognizes scientists of international renown who’ve made major contributions to basic or translational cancer research. Doug certainly fits that bill. As a young scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York in the 1980s, Doug created one of the first mouse models of cancer, reporting his landmark accomplishment in a single-author publication in Nature. Working with the late Judah Folkman, he went on to identify an “angiogenic switch” that triggers the blood vessel growth essential to tumorigenesis and explored the disruption of angiogenesis for cancer therapy. He has since used his models to investigate the stages of cancer progression, the tumor microenvironment, drug resistance and tumor immunology. Doug is also noted for authoring with Ludwig MIT Co-director Robert Weinberg The Hallmarks of Cancer, a landmark perspective on cancer biology published in Cell in 2000. Updated in 2011 and 2022, the essays established an unprecedented conceptual framework for understanding the cellular and molecular underpinnings of cancer. The papers remain among the most influential publications in modern cancer biology. Doug was honored and gave an award lecture during the AACR Annual Meeting in Chicago in April and was slated to be similarly honored at a special award ceremony in May in Trento, Italy.
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