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The National Cancer Institute (NCI) announced last week that it had finally succeeded in replicating the high-profile experiment of Harvard researcher Judah Folkman with a compound that shrinks tumours in mice by choking off their blood supply.

The NCI's success with mouse endostatin — just months after it had announced publicly that it could not replicate the results - led the institute last week to begin soliciting proposals for phase I (safety) trials of the human version of the drug.

NCI officials said that the reason they succeeded where they had failed earlier was that they had visited Folkman's laboratory at the Children's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, where they learned his techniques for dealing with the volatile natural compound.

The announcement more than doubled the share price of EntreMed, Inc., of Rockville, Maryland. The small company, which has obtained from the Children's Hospital in Boston the rights to develop the drug commercially, had seen its shares tumble to $12.77 earlier last week after Bristol-Myers Squibb announced that it was withdrawing its support for EntreMed's development of a similar compound, angiostatin.

They said it was not clear that angiostatin could be made in large enough amounts for human testing. The NCI announcement sent the share price up to $25.71.

The potential of both drugs — which in Folkman's experiments have worked most powerfully in combination — came into sharp public prominence last May after the New York Times ran a front-page story quoting Nobel laureate James Watson as saying that Folkman would “cure cancer in two years” (see Nature 393, 104 ; 1998 ).