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 Gertrude Belle Elion was an American biochemist and
pharmacologist. Holder of 45 patents and 23 honorary degrees, Elion
co-developed two of the first successful drugs for the treatment of Leukemia (thioguanine
and mercaptopurine) and azathioprine, which is used as an agent to prevent the
rejection of kidney transplants and to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Elion played
a major role in the development of
allopurinol for the treatment of gout and of acyclovir, the first
selective antiviral agent that was effective against herpes virus infections. In
1988, Dr. Gertrude B. Elion was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine.
Gertrude Belle Elion was born in New York City on January 23, 1918. Elion's father had emigrated from Lithuania to the United States at the age of 12 and
graduated from New York University School of Dentistry in 1914. Her mother had emigrated from Russia
and was 19 when she married Elion's father. When she was seven, Gertrude and
her parents moved from their Manhattan apartment
to the Bronx.
Elion describes her childhood as a happy one, attending public schools
where her insatiable thirst for knowledge made her an excellent student. She
says that at age 15, when her grandfather died from cancer, she decided she
wanted to go into medicine to cure cancer.
In 1933, she attended Hunter College,
majoring in chemistry. Elion received a Bachelors of Science in chemistry from Hunter College
in 1937 and a Masters in Science in chemistry from New York University
in 1941. During this time she struggled
to get a graduate research position, but was unable to because she was a
woman. After getting her Masters in
1941, because of WWII, many jobs normally held by men were available and she
was able to get a job doing quality control for a food company. After a year
and a half, she became bored with the repetitive nature of the job and applied
for research jobs. Elion eventually
ended up working for Dr. George Hitchings, who guided her, encouraged her
natural inquisitiveness, and gave her more and more responsibility.
Much of Gertrude's work involved purines and purine analogs,
synthesizing a large number of purines with Dr. Hitchings. These included
6-mercaptopurine (6MP), which had an antitumor effect without undue toxicity in
children with acute leukemia. It was so effective that the FDA approved its use
in late 1953, only 7 months after the clinical trial data had been made public.
Rather than trial and error, Elion and Hitchings at Burroughs-Wellcome (now
GlaxoSmithKline) used the differences in biochemistry between normal cells and
pathogens to design drugs that killed or inhibited the latter without harming
the former. Elion's work with purines produced many drugs that are used today. Researchers
following her methods later developed the AIDS drug AZT.
In 1983, Elion retired and became an advisor to the World
Health Organization and the American Association for Cancer Research. She
remained a consultant for her former employer. In 1988, Elion was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the techniques she developed for
identifying effective drug treatments. Gertrude B. Elion died in North Carolina in 1999
at age 81.
Resources:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1988/elion-autobio.html
http://www.nap.edu/html/biomems/gelion.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_B._Elion
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