- Person
- Jerome Horwitz
- Lived
- 1919–2012
- Field
- Medicinal chemistry
- From
- American
The story
Jerome Horwitz was born in Detroit in 1919 into a Jewish family and graduated from the city's Central High School in 1937. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in chemistry at the University of Detroit and a doctorate at the University of Michigan in 1948, followed by postdoctoral training at Northwestern University and Michigan. In the mid-1950s he joined the Detroit Institute of Cancer Research, later the Michigan Cancer Foundation and today the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, together with Wayne State University.
In 1964, with a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Horwitz synthesised a compound called azidothymidine, or AZT. It was designed to stop cancer cells from copying their DNA, but when it was tested in mice with leukaemia it did nothing. Development was shelved. Horwitz wrote up the disappointing results, never applied for a patent and moved on to other compounds.
Two decades later the AIDS epidemic was spreading and there was no treatment. After HIV was identified in 1983, Samuel Broder, Hiroaki Mitsuya and Robert Yarchoan at the US National Cancer Institute built a laboratory test to screen chemicals against the virus. The drug company Burroughs Wellcome sent AZT among a group of candidates, and in February 1985 the NCI team found that it strongly blocked HIV in cells. A placebo-controlled trial was halted early because patients taking AZT were living longer, and on 20 March 1987 the Food and Drug Administration approved it as the first treatment for HIV, only 25 months after that first laboratory result.
Horwitz heard about the discovery when a colleague showed him the 1985 report. He never earned money from the drug and later said that any bitterness he had once felt was long gone. He was also the first to synthesise stavudine (d4T) and zalcitabine (ddC), two more drugs of the same class used against HIV, and he kept working on cancer treatments until he retired in 2005.
AZT has since been joined by gentler medicines, but it remains on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines and is sold as an inexpensive generic. From 1994 to 1999 it was the main tool for stopping HIV from passing from mother to baby, and it is still used for that purpose and after accidental exposure to the virus.
Why it matters
AZT gave the first hope to people living with HIV, and it is still used to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the virus, protecting countless babies.
About Jerome Horwitz
Detroit chemist who made AZT in 1964 as a cancer drug that failed, two decades later it became the first approved treatment for HIV/AIDS, though he never earned a cent from it.
More about Jerome Horwitz
- Jerome Horwitz fought cancer in the lab until 86Jerome Horwitz kept working on cancer drugs into his eighties, sharing a $900,000 NCI grant for solid-tumour drugs and retiring from Wayne State in 2005 at 86.
- Horwitz's ddC became one of the first HIV drugsDideoxycytidine (ddC), first made in Jerome Horwitz's lab in the 1960s, was approved by the FDA in 1992 as one of the earliest HIV/AIDS treatments.
- Jerome Horwitz designed 'fraudulent' DNA building blocksIn the early 1960s Jerome Horwitz rejected random drug screening and designed 'fraudulent nucleosides' to trick cells into stopping DNA copying.
- Horwitz's stavudine treated HIV in poorer countriesStavudine (d4T), first created by Jerome Horwitz in the 1960s, was approved for HIV in 1994 and became widely used in developing countries for its low cost.
- Jerome Horwitz made X-gal, a staple of genetics labsIn 1964 Jerome Horwitz and colleagues first made X-gal, the compound that turns bacteria blue and lets biologists spot engineered DNA at a glance.
Sources
- Jerome Horwitz Wikipedia
- Zidovudine Wikipedia
- AIDS drug AZT inventor and famed cancer scientist Jerome Horwitz dies at 93 Wayne State University
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.