Word: acth
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Touted Wide. Medical researchers and big, blond Dr. John R. Mote, head of Armour Laboratories, would be happier if publicity on ACTH could have been delayed until their work was farther advanced. But the results of the first experimental treatments were too good to be withheld. The laboratories and clinics known to be using ACTH experimentally were bombarded with unanswerable requests from arthritis sufferers for a supply of the drug...
Alongside the medical research to learn just what ACTH can do and how it works...
Armour is conducting its own research in the hope of increasing the supply, said Mote. If the complex structure of the ACTH molecule can be determined, he hopes to be able to stop making it in minute quantities from hogs' heads, and start to synthesize it by the hogshead. Until then, the millions of sarthritics and the countless sufferers from gout and a dozen other diseases must live in hope...
...slave hormones whose flow can be speeded by ACTH is cortisone, formerly known as Compound E (TIME, June 13). Like its master, cortisone almost always relieves the symptoms of crippling rheumatoid arthritis in a few injections, but, again like its master, it must be used continuously or the condition recurs...
Cortisone is even scarcer than ACTH. Merck & Co., who make it, in 37 tedious steps, from the bile of butchered cattle, expect to produce little more than 1½ ounces a week for the rest of the year. Last week it was announced that henceforth cortisone will be doled out to suitable hospitals and research institutions through a committee of the National Academy of Sciences. And Merck has stopped giving it away: the price now is $60 for a 300-milligram vial ($5,670 an ounce...