The Angiogenesis Foundation

The Angiogenesis Foundation
Non-Profit
Founded 1994 in Cambridge, MA
Founder William W. Li, MD
Headquarters Cambridge, MA USA
Website angio.org

The Angiogenesis Foundation, is a United States 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization established in 1994 for the study of angiogenesis. The founders, Dr. William & Vincent Li, were former students of Dr. Judah Folkman, a pioneer of angiogenesis research.

The foundation focuses on treatments in the areas of cancer, cardiology, wound healing, dermatology, and ophthalmology.

The foundation developed a therapy for canine cancer, called the Navy Protocol. This treatment works by starving the tumor of its blood supply.[1]

In 1998, the Foundation led the establishment of angiogenic growth factor therapy as the first advanced treatment for diabetic foot ulcers. In 2004, they helped publicly launch the first antiangiogenic therapy for cancer, starting with colorectal cancer,[2] and later broadening to breast, lung, liver, kidney, and brain cancers.

Foundation Overview

Founded in 1994, the Angiogenesis Foundation is the world’s first 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to conquering disease using a new approach based on angiogenesis, the growth of new capillary blood vessels in the body. We have identified angiogenesis as the “common denominator” in society’s most feared diseases. Our focus on this underlying process of many different diseases makes our approach as a medical organization unique. The Foundation is the recognized, expert voice and champion of this new field of medicine.

Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Angiogenesis Foundation works to help people lead healthier, longer lives by restoring balance to blood vessel growth. Through research, education, and advocacy — with patients, physicians, researchers, industry, payers, and government — we enable patients to gain access to safe and effective treatments coming from the angiogenesis field for cancer, blinding diseases, wounds, and many other serious diseases.

As a scientific organization, the Angiogenesis Foundation is independent of any individual, institution, or commercial entity. We are committed to helping people around the world benefit from the full promise of angiogenesis-based medicine, and to make life-, limb-, and vision-saving treatments available to everyone in need.

History

In 1994, a group of physicians and scientists shared a vision that angiogenesis-based therapy could conquer the major diseases of our time. They established the Angiogenesis Foundation and set out to make the vision of angiogenesis-based medicine a reality.

The Angiogenesis Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable organization and research institution. For 18 years, the Angiogenesis Foundation has been and remains the world’s only organization dedicated exclusively to unlocking the mystery and promise of angiogenesis. Its mission is to improve global health through angiogenesis-based medicine, diets, and lifestyle by helping people restore balance to blood vessel growth and lead healthier, longer lives. The Angiogenesis Foundation serves as the leading voice in outreach and education for the field and continuously prompts research paths that have already generated some of the most effective cancer medications in our lifetime.

The Angiogenesis Foundation has assisted more than 10,000 patients in over 36 countries with finding evidence-based angiogenesis treatments and clinical trials. The Foundation is recognized as the world’s experts on scientific and clinical research within the field of angiogenesis, including drug and device developments. The Foundation is committed to helping people around the world benefit from the full promise of angiogenesis-based medicine to provide new hope and make life-, limb-, and vision-saving treatments available to everyone in need.

People

William W. Li, M.D.

Chief Executive Officer, President, & Medical Director

William W. Li is Chief Executive Officer, President, Medical Director, and Co-founder of the Angiogenesis Foundation. Will trained in the lab of Dr. Judah Folkman, pioneer of the angiogenesis field, and has been actively engaged in angiogenesis research and clinical development for 30 years. Under Will’s leadership, the Foundation has developed a unique social enterprise model based on value creating collaborations with leading medical academic centers, biopharmaceutical and medical device companies, and government agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

As President, Will has testified and presented before congressional and other government panels on the impact of angiogenesis in healthcare, and lectures around the world on angiogenesis-related topics in front of clinical, government, and industrial audiences. He is actively engaged in global efforts to advance the applications of angiogenesis-based therapeutics across diverse medical fields, including oncology/hematology, cardiology, ophthalmology, vascular surgery, dermatology, wound care, and regenerative medicine. He has been published in Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Nature Reviews and other leading peer-reviewed medical journals. Will’s TED talk on angiogenesis has received more than 5 million views.

Will received his A.B. with honors from Harvard College, and his M.D. from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pennsylvania. He completed his internship, residency, and fellowship training in General Internal Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Will has held appointments on the clinical faculties of Harvard Medical School, Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, and Dartmouth Medical School. He serves as advisor and consultant to leading global public and private companies.

Vincent W. Li, M.D., M.B.A

Chief Operating Officer & Scientific Director

Dr. Vincent W. Li is the Chief Operating Officer and Scientific Director of the Angiogenesis Foundation. He has been involved in the field of angiogenesis since 1998, and has been on the Board since its inception in 1994. Dr. Li conducted his bachelor’s thesis with Harvard Professor Howard Green, a pioneer of epidermal and fibroblast biology, and performed his doctoral dissertation on growth factors and tumor angiogenesis as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellow in the research laboratory of angiogenesis pioneer Dr. Judah Folkman.

He currently serves as Medical Director of the Angiogenesis and Wound Healing Center in the Department of Dermatology at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. His honors include the Paul Dudley White Award, the MIT-Japan Science and Technology Prize, First Place Award in the Scientific and Clinical poster competition at the American Academy of Dermatology annual meeting, and the highest recognition (Daland Award) from the New England Cancer Society. Dr. Li received his bachelor’s degree magna cum laude, from Harvard College, his M.D. cum laude from Harvard Medical School and M.I.T.’s Health Sciences & Technology Division, and his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

He was also the Fiske Scholar at Cambridge University, England. He completed his clinical training in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and in dermatology through the Harvard Program. Dr. Li is an active member of the American Academy of Dermatology, American Society for Clinical Oncology, Wound Healing Society, and has a leadership role on the national Wound Healing Cooperative Group (WHCG). He publishes and lectures internationally.

Diana Saville

Chief Innovation Officer

Diana Saville is the Chief Innovation Officer of the Angiogenesis Foundation, a nonprofit organization created to re-conceptualize health and fighting disease through angiogenesis, the process used by the body to grow and maintain blood vessels.

Diana develops innovative strategies and value-based social enterprise solutions for advancing health initiatives ranging from treatment to prevention of major diseases, such as cancer, vision loss, and chronic wounds. She works with leaders in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry, NGOs, patient advocacy, and medical associations to align interests and create high impact collaborations supporting the Angiogenesis Foundation’s mission. She has served as a delegate at the Clinton Global Initiative, at Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute programs, and at strategic advocacy summits across Europe and North America.

Diana is an expert in communicating complex scientific concepts related to science, medicine, and industry. Her creative work has been featured in the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and at TEDMED, and her visual media has received the Award of Excellence from the American Association of Medical Illustrators. She has played a creative role in successful initiatives at the American Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, the U.S. Air Force, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories.

Diana also leads the Global Leadership Incubator, in partnership with Lobsang Sangey, Prime Minister of Tibetan Government-in-Exile, the H.H. Dalai Lama, and the Department of Education, Central Tibetan Administration, which provides scholarship opportunities for exceptional Tibetan students in India and Himalayan regions to study at top colleges and universities in the United States.

Diana received her undergraduate degree with honors in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard College, and began working with Pixar animators and university professors to describe molecular phenomena while pursuing a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Eric Lowitt

Acting Chief Strategy Officer

Liz Alverson

VP, Strategic Communications and Programs

Maria Aufiero

Operations Manager

Joshua Mann, M.P.H.

Program Manager

Jeffrey McRae, M.S.

Grants Administrator

Lauren DeMello

Programs Specialist

Courtney Martel

Executive Assistant

Monica Perkins

Programs Executive Assistant

Mia Lin

Programs

Robert Mittman

Strategy, Foresight, and Facilitation Team Leader

Lisa Arora

Visual Practitioner

Michelle Hutnik, D.Sc.

Medical Science

Joy Ko Li, Ph.D.

Program Manager

Albert Chiou, M.D., M.B.A, M.Phil.

Fellow

Programs

The Angiogenesis Foundation takes a unique approach to achieving our mission to help people lead longer, better, and healthier lives. First, we have the expertise and invest the time and resources to deeply understand the complex needs of our multiple stakeholders, patients, doctors, scientists, industry, regulators, payors, policymakers, the financial community. We seek the input of our advisors, external scientific and medical experts, educators, and our networks of physicians, and patient advocates. We then design programs that best align these interests in ways that can measurably help us meet our mission to help improve patients lives through the angiogenesis field. Our program philosophy is that patients can achieve increasingly better outcomes when the needs of different groups involved in both developing and delivering treatment are met. Through this process, we fund programs that achieve specific well-defined goals.

Over the course of our organization’s history, the Foundation has been involved in many diverse, strategic programs tailored to the swiftly changing nature of scientific and medical research, the educational needs of the health care community, the evolving industry and regulatory and payer environments, and the impact of health care economics of actual health care itself. Our present programs are centered around: Outreach, Education, and Research.

Advocacy

Advocating for improved clinical outcomes is a priority for the Angiogenesis Foundation. Generating awareness, accurate understanding, and differentiation between new and pre-existing treatments are critical elements for improving the quality of healthcare worldwide. The Foundation works by bringing together key stakeholders to jointly define the challenges facing treatment at the level of access, then identifying the barriers to modern care, prioritizing those that can be effectively addressed, and then road mapping specific actions to take that will make innovative and validated treatments available to patients.

To these ends, the Foundation leverages its third party position, expertise, networks, and distribution channels to: establish awareness about specific diseases and unmet needs; discuss the data supporting the value of emerging validated treatments; identify methods to optimize care pathways.

The Foundation’s advocacy initiatives have focused on engaging and delivering key messages to:

Summits

The Angiogenesis Foundation organizes and convenes Regional and International Expert Summits to develop a high-level consensus in angiogenesis-dependent disease areas. Summits aim to bring multistakeholder perspectives together on how to improve patient outcomes. Using a highly successful advocacy model to engage stakeholders in discussions, issues addressed include the state of the field for diagnosis and treatment; the state of disease awareness and its treatments among both the patient community and the public at large; the current care pathways, from awareness to diagnosis to treatment to follow-up; the rationale for antiangiogenic therapies; and issues concerning the efficacy and safety of all therapy options.

Expert Summits leverage the Foundation’s third party status, its international convening power, its expertise in paradigm-shifting therapy development, its expert networks, and its goal of improving patient outcomes on an international scale to bring together a diverse group of participants. The invited experts represent leading clinicians and translational science experts in angiogenesis, along with other important stakeholders, such as key leaders from advocacy organizations and representatives from related medical communities.

Events are recorded and transcribed by a professional medical writer to generate a White Paper Report that clearly defines the issues, challenges, and recommendations on how to optimize the use of antiangiogenic therapy and how to improve treatment outcomes.

Research

Advancing medicine through research is central to the mission of the Angiogenesis Foundation. We fund and conduct research in five priority areas that the Foundation has identified as being under-studied and under-funded, but with tremendous potential for rapidly improving care on a practical level:

  1. Prevention research: The Angiogenesis Foundation is interested in developing methods to prevent disease through controlling angiogenesis. Angioprevention has been shown to prevent tumor development. The Foundation is studying this application through two main approaches:
    1. Using medications that can be safely taken for years (chemoprevention)
    2. Dietary prevention, using bioactive molecules present in dietary sources (fruits, vegetables, tea, herbs, etc.), to prevent angiogenesis in disease. Specifically, the Foundation is interested in diet-based strategies for maintaining the normal healthy balance of angiogenesis regulation in the body.
  2. Veterinary applications of angiogenesis: The Angiogenesis Foundation is interested in research that helps animals benefit from angiogenesis-based therapies. This creates a vital bridge between human medical research and animal health. The following areas are of specific interest:
    1. Antiangiogenic therapy approaches to pet dogs with cancer.
    2. Angiogenic growth factors therapy to speed healing in delayed closure wounds and injury in a variety of species.
  3. Biomarkers: The Angiogenesis Foundation is interested in research that supports the understanding and development of biomarkers for disease. The following areas are of specific interest:
    1. Circulating biomarkers for the early detection of disease and monitoring effects of treatment.
    2. Functional imaging as a biomarker for angiogenesis
  4. Tissue repair and regeneration: The Angiogenesis Foundation is interested in research that advances the treatment of wounds and replaces the form and function of lost tissue through regenerative therapy. The following areas are of specific interest:
    1. Therapeutic angiogenesis.
    2. Regenerative therapies based on progenitor cells, growth factors, and gene transfer.

References

  1. ↑ Dog's tale of survival opens door in cancer research, July 24, 2002
  2. ↑ Colon cancer drug seen as long awaited victory, February 26, 2004
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