APRIL 8, 2025, NEW YORK – The Ludwig Cancer Research community extends its warmest congratulations to Ludwig Harvard’s Rakesh Jain, who has received the 2025 AACR Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cancer Research.
Jain is recognized by the AACR for contributions to the field that have enriched our understanding of the tumor microenvironment and its central role in cancer progression and responses to therapy. In issuing its award, the AACR singled out for mention Jain’s formulation and examination of the hypothesis of vascular normalization, which it noted “reshaped the use of antiangiogenic therapy and led to FDA-approved drug combinations” for cancer therapy.
Jain’s pioneering research established that abnormalities in the blood and lymphatic vessels in tumors support cancer growth, limit the delivery of drugs into tumors and diminish their efficacy. Based on these discoveries, he subsequently proposed that antiangiogenic agents might “normalize” blood vessels and showed in a series of preclinical studies not only that this was true but that such therapies improved the delivery and efficacy of chemotherapies and targeted cancer drugs as well as the infiltration of anti-cancer immune cells into tumors and their stimulation by immunotherapy. Multiple clinical trials, some led by Jain in partnership with clinical researchers, have since led to the regulatory approval of various drug combinations with antiangiogenic therapies for the treatment of several types of cancer.
Jain is the third current member of the Ludwig community to have received the Lifetime Achievement award. Ludwig Lausanne’s Douglas Hanahan and Ludwig MIT’s Co-director Robert Weinberg have both been similarly honored. A chemical engineer by training, Jain has won numerous other awards for his landmark contributions to cancer research, most notably the 2013 United States National Medal of Science, which was given to him by President Barack Obama. Jain will be officially honored and deliver an award lecture on Sunday, April 27, at 3 p.m., during the AACR Annual Meeting at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago, Illinois.
You can learn more about Jain and his research in this 2019 webinar in which he presented his work and this release prepared by the AACR.