Jerome Horwitz, Researcher and Inventor of AZT In 1964, Dies at age 93

Posted on September 23, 2012 by Jeffrey Newman

In 1987, The U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop publicly predicted that the HIV/AIDS virus would kill 100 million people by the year 2000. Today there are over 34 million people who are living with HIV according to the World Health Organization (WHO). In 1964 medical researcher Jerome Horwitz first synthesized a chemical compound AZT, thinking it might be a cure for some kinds of cancer. Twenty years later, the compound, which Horwitz never even patented, turned out to be a treatment for HIV/AIDS. The back story about why Horwitz began to work on AZT and how it came into its own as a treatment for AIDS is worthwhile to review and is directly related to a topic I have written about as a main theme in this blog–the serendipity of drug development and the need to enhance connections and communications in the field of disease therapies. Horwitz was working at Wayne State University in Detroit, floundering in his efforts to find a cure for some cancers. He is quoted as saying that he got tired of randomly selecting drugs for cancer by just pulling chemicals off the shelf. So he began creating his own compounds and testing them on cancer cells in petri dishes. One of them, Azidothymymidine, which he viewed as a kind of TROJAN HORSE or fraudulent nucleoside which cancer cells use to divide. His theory was, once it was injected into the cells, the cancer would fail to divide. For reasons unknown it did not work in the petri dish or in mice and  and the chemical was shelved. Now here is the interesting part. The drug was re-examined by Wolfram Osterlag at the Max Planck Institute who was studying the Friend Leukemia Virus (FLV). Osterlag found that AZT could successfully inhibit replication of the virus in mouse cells while leaving the cells unaffected. However  at the time FLV  is a retrovirus not thought to be the source of significant disease in humans. That was-until scientists began to understand that HIV was caused by a retrovirus.  The rest is history. Driven by the assistance of a major drug manufacturer, two researchers Samuel Broder and Hiroaki Mitsuyo discovered that AZT stopped HIV growth in cultured human cells. AZT’s value was really seen when used in combination with other drugs. In 1986 Jerome Horwitz was quoted as saying that he had found an interesting compound that was waiting for the right disease. Dr. Horwitz died of pneumonia and a heart attack at the age of 93 in Michigan.