- Person
- Jerome Horwitz
- Lived
- 1919–2012
- Field
- Medicinal chemistry
- From
- American
The story
Among the compounds Jerome Horwitz made at the Detroit Institute of Cancer Research and Wayne State University in the 1960s was one originally named d4T, first described in 1966. Like his other fraudulent nucleosides it was designed to sabotage the copying of genetic material in cancer cells, and like them it waited decades for its moment.
When the AIDS epidemic arrived in the 1980s, William Prusoff and colleagues at Yale University discovered that d4T, now called stavudine, was active against HIV. In 1990 Yale patented its use for treating the virus and granted Bristol-Myers Squibb an exclusive license to make it under the brand name Zerit.
In 1992 stavudine became the first drug to be granted parallel track status by the US Food and Drug Administration, allowing patients to receive it before formal approval. It went through the accelerated approval process, judged by its effect on CD4 immune cell counts, and on 27 June 1994 the FDA approved it for the treatment of HIV infection, making it the fourth drug approved for the disease.
At first its price, more than $1,600 a year, put it out of reach in poor countries. Médecins Sans Frontières found an Indian manufacturer willing to supply it to South Africa for about $40 a year per patient, but Yale's South African patent stood in the way. Yale students joined the campaign, and after the dispute was publicised Bristol-Myers Squibb announced that it would not enforce the patent in South Africa and would sell Zerit in sub-Saharan Africa for $55 a year.
Because it became cheap and widely available, stavudine turned into a mainstay of first-line HIV treatment in developing countries, including India, during the years when access to antiretroviral therapy was expanding rapidly. Its long-term side effects later led the World Health Organization, in 2009, to recommend phasing it out in favour of less toxic drugs such as AZT or tenofovir.
Why it matters
Stavudine helped bring life-saving HIV treatment to people in poorer countries who could not afford newer drugs, and the fight over its price helped open the door to low-cost generic HIV medicines.
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 made AZT, the first HIV treatmentIn 1964 Detroit chemist Jerome Horwitz synthesised AZT as a possible cancer drug; in 1987 it became the first approved treatment for HIV, and he also first made two more HIV drugs.
- 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.
- 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
- Stavudine Wikipedia
- Jerome Horwitz Wikipedia
- AIDS drug AZT inventor and famed cancer scientist Jerome Horwitz dies at 93 Wayne State University
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