In 1993 he surprised the scientific world by hypothesizing that angiogenesis is as important in blood cancers as it is in solid tumors, and the next year he published work showing that a biomarker of angiogenesis was higher in all people with cancer, but especially high in people with blood cancers, and other evidence of the role of angiogenesis in blood cancers emerged as well. Meanwhile, a member of his lab, Robert D'Amato, was looking for angiogenesis inhibitors, and discovered that thalidomide inhibited angiogenesis in 1994. Around that time, the wife of a man who was dying of multiple myeloma and whom standard treatments had failed, called Folkman asking him about his anti-angiogenesis ideas. Folkman convinced the patient's doctor to try thalidomide, and that doctor ended up conducting a clinical trial of thalidomide for people with multiple myeloma in which about a third of the subjects responded to the treatment. The results of that trial were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1999.