Judah Folkman, who died Monday at 74, introduced the idea that cancer could be fought by attacking the disease’s blood supply. The anti-angiogenic therapy that resulted, currently used on over 1 million patients in 30 countries, is considered by many a fourth way of treating cancer, supplementing radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery.

Folkman died of an apparent heart attack at the Denver International Airport while en route to giving a talk in Vancouver, British Columbia, his family announced. A surgeon and researcher at the Harvard Medical School, Folkman struggled for decades to win acceptance for his discovery that angiogenesis was critical to the growth of tumors. His Harvard lab produced the first angiogenesis inhibitors, drugs meant to stop the growth of capillaries that bring nutrients to the fast-growing cancer cells while helping them to metastasize.

But recent years have seen angiogenesis inhibition therapy take off with drugs such as Tarceva and Avastin, one of the fastest-selling anti-cancer drugs in history. The same inhibitors, including the old morning sickness drug thalidomide, have revolutionized the treatment of macular degeneration, a primary cause of blindness. Other therapies use the principle in reverse, for instance stimulating capillaries to promote healing after heart attacks.

Moses Judah Folkman was born February 24, 1933, in Cleveland. His father was a rabbi, and Folkman’s interest in medicine was sparked when he accompanied his father on hospital visits from age 7. His talent as a researcher emerged early. He asked for a microscope for his bar mitzvah. In high school, he won a prize for a science project that involved keeping a rat heart beating outside the body using a bicycle pump and a toy refrigerator. As a pre-med at Ohio State University, Folkman co-authored papers on liver cancer and graduated in three years. While studying at Harvard Medical School, he helped design one of the first implanted pacemakers.

Following a surgical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Folkman was drafted and went to work at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where he did research on substitutes for blood transfusions. A patent he shared in 1962 covered a method for time-release drug delivery that later was used in the contraceptive Norplant.

It was while he was working in Bethesda that Folkman made his central insight into angiogenesis: Tumors would not grow in the absence of ample blood supplies. After returning to Boston, where he took a teaching post at Harvard’s medical school and became surgeon-in-chief at Children’s Hospital, Folkman continued research into tumor formation. A landmark paper on angiogenesis in the New England Journal of Medicine was greeted with skepticism by most of the scientific community, especially in the absence of a mechanism or chemical that increased capillary growth. Folkman called it “angiongenesis factor,” and isolating the chemical pathways took years. But in 1974, Folkman garnered a $23 million grant from the Monsanto Co., among the largest private medical funding projects at a university to that date. His laboratory began attracting top talent.

In 1981, a Folkman retired reluctantly from his surgery career to concentrate on the search for angiogenesis inhibitors. Various tumor angiogenesis agents and then angiogenesis inhibitors emerged from his lab during the 1980s and 1990s. Folkman helped develop nearly 100 patents.

At one point in 1998, when it seemed the promise of angiogenesis therapy had been overhyped, Folkman told U.S. News & World Report: “If you have cancer and you’re a mouse, we can we can take good care of you.”

But clinical applications advanced quickly, and by the end of his career, Folkman foresaw a day when cancer would be a chronic condition, such as diabetes, what he called “cancer without disease.” In one of his last interviews, he told the Boston Globe, “It may be that patients will have little tiny cancers that lie dormant for a long time.”

Although Folkman’s wife once said, “His hobby is his work,” he was a serviceable trumpet player, and enjoyed seeing his wife, Paula Prial Folkman, perform each summer with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two daughters and a granddaughter.