MARCH 11, 2025, NEW YORK - Ludwig Cancer Research congratulates Douglas Hanahan, Ludwig Distinguished Scholar at the Lausanne Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, on his selection as recipient of the Pezcoller Foundation-AACR International Award for Extraordinary Achievement in Cancer Research. Established 28 years ago, this highly prestigious award recognizes scientists of international renown who have made major contributions to basic or translational cancer research.
Hanahan has done quite a bit of both. His numerous and varied contributions to the field have profoundly influenced our understanding of cancer initiation and progression and opened new approaches to its diagnosis and treatment.
As a young scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York in the 1980s, Hanahan created one of the first mouse models engineered to develop cancers in specific organs, reporting his landmark accomplishment in a single-author publication in Nature. In collaboration with the late Judah Folkman, he went on to identify in his mouse models an "angiogenic switch" that triggers the induction of blood vessel growth essential to tumorigenesis and explored the pharmacological disruption of angiogenesis as a means of cancer therapy. In the years since, he has used his models to examine the stages of cancer progression through metastasis, the vital role of the tumor microenvironment in such processes, the mechanisms by which tumors resist therapy and the immune system's multifaceted interplay with the growing tumor.
Hanahan is also noted for his authorship, with Ludwig MIT Co-director Robert Weinberg, of The Hallmarks of Cancer, a landmark perspective on cancer biology published in Cell in 2000. The essay, updated in subsequent papers published in 2011 and 2022, 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. Hanahan has continued developing the themes of those publications while his lab has used the framework they established to guide its investigations of tumor biology.
Hanahan will officially receive the award and present a lecture during the AACR Annual Meeting 2025, which will be held from April 25-30 at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago, Illinois. He will also be honored at a special award ceremony in May in Trento, Italy.
In addition to his Ludwig Distinguished Scholar appointment, Hanahan is an Emeritus Professor in the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research within the School of Life Sciences at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne.
