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BRIAN DEER:
HARD SELL Page 4
The
Sunday Times (London) March 6 1994
When in 1944
Gertrude Elion joined the laboratories of the New
York-based Burroughs Wellcome Company, its executives
only reluctantly accepted her, as a favour to their
chief biochemist. "Okay, there's a war on,"
they conceded, perusing the then-26-year-old's
details; but she had recently been flitting from job
to job and had not got her doctorate. In addition,
they declared, she was female and would therefore,
sooner or later, quit science for marriage and a
family.
Fifty years
later, generations of the drug firm's management have
swept in and later cleared their desks. And the
United States’ operation has moved south to
Durham County in North Carolina. But Elion is still
firmly on the Burroughs Wellcome payroll, and shows
no sign of quitting. Scattered about her office in
the British-owned company's headquarters, she
displays 18 (honorary) doctorates, a Nobel prize for
medicine, and square metres of other distinctions.
She has also confounded her long-gone critics by only
ever being married to her job.
She did,
however, help to start a family - though not of the
usual kind. With the man who hired her, Dr George
Hitchings, her labours in the laboratory spawned a
string of medical products. Without them, the
Wellcome drugs empire, started by the late Sir Henry
Wellcome, might have gone bust decades ago.
There was
6-mercaptopurine, the first treatment for leukaemia;
azathioprine (or Imuran), for use in organ
transplants; allopurinol (Zyloric or Zyloprim), for
gout; and pyrimethamine (or Daraprim), an
anti-malarial. There was trimethoprim (part of
Septrin, Septra or Septran), an antibacterial; and
acyclovir (Zovirax), the most effective treatment for
herpes. These drugs then paved the road to Wellcome's
AZT (Retrovir), for people diagnosed with Aids.
The scale of
her achievement in half a century of research is hard
for nonspecialists to grasp. Both Elion and Hitchings
- now aged 89 - who shared the 1988 Nobel prize for
medicine with Britain's Sir James Black, often find
it best to explain in anecdotes the difference their
drugs make to patients.
Recently,
Elion (“Trudy” to her friends) got a letter
from a mother whose child’s life was saved by a
course of acyclovir. Hitchings - who thinks he met
Henry Wellcome in the 1930s - looks back to the
decade that followed, when mercaptopurine gave
remission to a woman with leukemia, who had a child
before she relapsed.
But you won't
get much help from either inventor in ranking their
inventions' importance. "It's like being asked
to discriminate amongst your children," Elion
says. "It's very difficult to say that
mercaptopurine was more important than Imuran, was
more important than allopurinol. Or that acyclovir
was more important than all of them. Because they
came at different times. They were for different
uses. And each one in its own time was kind of a
revolutionary drug."
Viewed by the
accountants and salespeople at Burroughs
Wellcome’s parent company in London, however,
some look better than others. Together, a quartet of
billion-dollar drugs - allopurinol, Septrin, AZT and
acyclovir - have turned Wellcome from what was
essentially a small-time marketing outfit at the time
Elion joined it, into one of today’s
pharmaceutical giants. Yielding more than half the
company's £2 billion sales revenue last year, they
have transformed it into one of the few world-name
corporations still controlled from the United
Kingdom.
Besides
filling the coffers of the parent - trading,
confusingly, as the Wellcome Foundation - the same
four products have also crammed the kitty for the yet
mightier Wellcome Trust. This body - a registered
charity set up under the terms of Henry
Wellcome’s will - controls the company with 40%
stake, and is the richest medical research fund in
the world. With assets of more than £10billion, it
funds work by thousands of doctors and scientists.
The trust
gives out more than £400m a year, with the biggest
awards in 1993 to specialists working in
neurosciences, molecular and cell biology,
physiology, pharmacology, infectious diseases and
immunity. Its American equivalent, the Burroughs
Wellcome Fund, also makes major grants, mainly to
support pharmacology research and foreign travel by
favoured individuals.
During the
1970s and 1980s (when the charity still held all of
the company's share capital), it was mostly profits
derived from Elion and Hitchings’s allopurinol
and Septrin which flowed through the trust and the
fund. Then, unlocked in record-breaking stock market
flotations in 1986 and 1992, the growth-spurts of
their children AZT and acyclovir became the source of
windfall cash.
*****
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