Such public—private partnerships could help to accelerate anti-infective drug development today, an urgent need if we are to avoid the risk of falling back into the pre-antibiotic times of Ehrlich. Ehrlich, P. Chemotherapy Pergamon Press, London, Google Scholar. Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Two handwritten cards of Paul Ehrlich. He used to pass over such cards to his co-workers on a daily basis giving them recommendations for reading articles, requests for new compounds to be synthesized, and so on.
PDF kb. Reprints and Permissions. Kaufmann, S. Paul Ehrlich: founder of chemotherapy. Nat Rev Drug Discov 7, Download citation. Issue Date : May Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Infection Nature Chemical Biology Biophysics Reports Research on Chemical Intermediates Advanced search.
Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. Download PDF. During that same period, the US Army was studying a number of chemicals related to mustard gas to develop more effective agents for war and also develop protective measures.
In the course of that work, a compound called nitrogen mustard was studied and found to work against a cancer of the lymph nodes called lymphoma.
This agent served as the model for a long series of similar but more effective agents called alkylating agents that killed rapidly growing cancer cells by damaging their DNA. Not long after the discovery of nitrogen mustard, Sidney Farber of Boston demonstrated that aminopterin, a compound related to the vitamin folic acid, produced remissions in children with acute leukemia.
Aminopterin blocked a critical chemical reaction needed for DNA replication. That drug was the predecessor of methotrexate, a cancer treatment drug used commonly today. Since then, other researchers discovered drugs that block different functions in cell growth and replication.
The era of chemotherapy had begun. Metastatic cancer was first cured in when methotrexate was used to treat a rare tumor called choriocarcinoma. Over the years, chemotherapy drugs chemo have successfully treated many people with cancer.
Long-term remissions and even cures of many patients with Hodgkin disease and childhood ALL acute lymphoblastic leukemia treated with chemo were first reported during the s. Cures of testicular cancer were seen during the next decade. Many other cancers can be controlled with chemo for long periods of time, even if they are not cured.
Today, several approaches are available to improve the activity and reduce the side effects of chemo. These include:. Early in the 20th century, only cancers small and localized enough to be completely removed by surgery were curable. Flood the body with toxic substances, the theory went, and the disease could be snuffed out or at least beaten back. On this point, Conant has to labour to connect the dots. The inspiration for chemotherapy did not come from Bari.
Yale University researchers in New Haven, Connecticut, first treated cancer with nitrogen mustard in ; the patient died of lymphosarcoma a year before the Germans attacked the Italian harbour.
He is much harder to like. Fiercely driven and passionate about curing cancer, Rhoads oversold preliminary research results and rushed into clinical trials.
Before the war, Rhoads worked at Rockefeller University in New York City, and he travelled to Puerto Rico to study conditions such as anaemia and tropical sprue. There, he penned a hideously racist letter — unsent but discovered by his office staff — claiming to have transplanted cancer cells into healthy Puerto Ricans, whom he compared to animals.
Nevertheless, Rhoads continued to wield significant influence in military and academic science. He applied that influence with full force to the search for chemotherapies. Scepticism from other physicians was rampant. Surgery and radiation were nearly the only options, and cancer was so lethal and stigmatized that patients often were not told of their diagnosis. Drugs, money and misleading evidence. Opponents were horrified by the toxicity of chemotherapies and unimpressed by the ephemeral reprieves that most offered.
Despite that challenge, Rhoads planted the seeds for the cancer-research enterprise that continues today. Drug-screening efforts are more sophisticated, and the chemical libraries that they trawl are orders of magnitude larger and more complex. For a science-hungry reader, The Great Secret has a few too many excursions into the strategies, personalities and troop movements of the Second World War.
And I yearned for more on the development of ethical boundaries between experimentation and treatment, which remain fuzzy in cancer research. Today, chemotherapy has advanced; some drugs are less toxic, given at lower doses, or more-targeted in their effects. But the benefits are still too often transient.
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