Douglas Hanahan was Honored with the 2025 Pezcoller Foundation-AACR International Award for Extraordinary Cancer Research
Career Highlights
Douglas Hanahan, PhD, FAACR, has been selected to receive the 2025 Pezcoller Foundation–AACR International Award for Extraordinary Achievement in Cancer Research.
The award will be presented during the AACR Annual Meeting 2025, taking place from April 25-30 at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago, Illinois.
Notable achievements include:
- Founding co-director of the Swiss Cancer Center Leman
- Founding co-director of the Agora Translational Cancer Research Center
- Introduced the influential “Hallmarks of Cancer” in 2000
- Co-discovered the “angiogenic switch”
- Focus on cancer-related neuroscience, including the role of neuronal signaling pathways in cancer metastasis and immune evasion
Education and Early Career
Earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976 and received a Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard University in 1983.
Academic Positions
Distinguished Scholar at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (Zurich/New York)
Emeritus Professor of Molecular Oncology and former Director of the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL)
Awards and Honors
Elected as a Fellow of the AACR Academy in 2014
Elected to prestigious organizations like the Royal Society (2023), the National Academy of Sciences (2009), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007)
Research Contributions
Revealed that oncogene expression alone isn’t enough to drive tumor formation, highlighting the need for additional factors like resistance to cell death, angiogenesis, and immune evasion
Publications
“Hallmarks of Cancer”: New Dimensions. Cancer Discov 1 January 2022; 12 (1): 31–46. doi.org/10.1158/2159-8290.CD-21-1059