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In 1939, when millions of adults were preparing to kill each other during the Second World War, Stewart Adams was a disoriented teenager. At 16, she decided to throw in the towel and leave school. He was a child of the working clbad. His father, a train driver, had vision problems and was demoted to a less qualified position in the city of March, a railway track in eastern England. There was no sign that this stunned young man would relieve the suffering of billions of people.
Stewart Adams got his first job on the advice of a family friend. Still underdeveloped, he began working as an apprentice at Boots, a local network of pharmacies. A teenager with no apparent vocation for study did not seem to be the best tenant of the company, but Adams continued to study the pharmacy during his free time, trading himself for nearly 30 years. In 1953 he was commissioned to find a more effective oral anti-inflammatory. of course that aspirin. In 1969, three decades after his start as an apprentice, he brought ibuprofen into pharmacy. This boy was one of the best recruits in history.
Adolescent, Adams enters as an apprentice in a pharmacy and then studies the pharmacy in his spare time
Adams dies on January 30 at the age of 95. according to the company that has been his company for half of his life. This was, stresses the company, "an anonymous hero". Today, ibuprofen is used for the treatment of almost all mild to moderate pain, from migraine to caries, through painful menstruation or postoperative process. Before Adams, this joker did not exist.
The quest for superaspirin was epic, as reported by Australian pharmacologist Kim Rainsford in his book Ibuprofen (not yet published in Brazil). In 1941, Nazi pilots of the Luftwaffe launched hundreds of bombs on Nottingham, destroying part of Boots' research facilities. When Adams began his project in 1953, his lab was housed in the living room of a former Victorian mansion on the outskirts of the city. He had only one badistant, Colin Burrows, later joined by chemist John Nicholson.
Scientists administered the products orally to hairless guinea pigs, which they used in the treatment of the disease, then exposed to a jet of ultraviolet light that caused them to burn.If the inflammation of the skin was mild or insignificant, the anti-inflammatory substance was effective.The process was very slow.On December 19 In 1961, a compound called RB 1472, originally designed as a herbicide, demonstrated activity against guinea pig erythema.I would end up being baptized with ibuprofen, but I do not have it. was then that another candidate.
The Adams team began by testing aspirin-type compounds derived from salicylic acid. These compounds were then concentrated on two substances synthesized in Boots' herbicide development program, which had anti-inflammatory activity. They produced 600 variants. The most promising, BTS8402, was about 10 times more potent than aspirin in the laboratory and was being tested in a clinical trial of people with rheumatoid arthritis, the same disease that affected Jesse Boot, son of the founder of society, all his life. The experiment was a failure, but the badysis of the results suggested that it was not enough to search for an anti-inflammatory substance, it was also necessary to fight against fever and pain.
But how do you know if an animal feels pain? The Adams team adopted an ingenious technique developed in 1957 by researchers L. O. Randall and J. J. Selitto. They pinned a rat, but allowed him to move his right hind leg freely. With a non-pointed stalk, the scientists exerted increasing pressure on the limb until the animal felt pain and removed it. Stewart Adams "srcset =" // ep00.epimg.net/t.gif 200w "data-srcset =" // ep01.epimg.net/english/imagenes/2019/02/05/ciencia/1549368311_575460_1549369627_sumario_normal_recorte1.jpg 720w, / /ep01.epimg.net/english/imagenes/2019/02/05/ciencia/1549368311_575460_1549369627_sumario_normal.jpg 360w "/>
The Adams Group – after testing about 600 additional molecules in the dog and rat – beginning of clinical trials in humans with three other compounds: BTS10335, BTS10499 and ibufenac. The first two caused rashes in the patients, but ibufenac seemed safe. It went on sale in 1966 in the United Kingdom. A few years later, he was removed from the market, liver damage was reported in some people who took it frequently. The attention was then turned to this molecule with anti-inflammatory activity detected on December 19, 1961. "I was the first person to take ibuprofen," Adams explained in an interview for the journal Trends in Pharmacological Sciences in 2012. "I've always thought that it was important to take the first dose before asking others to do it." He had already tried medications previously, but never before, he had done a 30-day toxicity test on rats! "
The fifth was a success
The team led by Adams studied 1,500 compounds at Animal and took five. for experiments on the man. The fifth succeeded. Clinical trials have shown that ibuprofen was effective in patients with rheumatoid arthritis without major side effects. In 1969, the British authorities approved the drug. In 1971, after an evening with colleagues, Adams discovered that ibuprofen relieved a hangover, while he laughed at the British newspaper The Telegraph . And in 1983, with the growing number of therapeutic indications, the regulator authorized the sale of the drug without a prescription.
"Who could have predicted, more than 35 years ago, that the search for a drug for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis would create a link between sunburn in guinea pigs, Toothache and pain menstrual? ", asked Adams himself in 1992 in the specialized publication The Journal of Clinical Pharmacology . It is often said that drug testing is a minefield and that you have to be lucky not to succumb to the path. But Adams preferred to recall a phrase of the French chemist Louis Pasteur: "Luck only promotes the prepared mind." Today, annual sales of ibuprofen worldwide reach $ 3 billion (R11 billion), according to Rainsford. In 1987, the man who had abandoned at age 16 was appointed an officer of the order of the British Empire.
