Word: azt
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From the start, the company and an independent review board had agreed that if AZT proved to be toxic, the patients would immediately be taken off the drug and the test halted. But if AZT turned out to be clearly beneficial, it would immediately be offered to those patients who had been receiving only the placebo -- which would in effect also terminate the study. But everyone, including Dannie King, Burroughs Wellcome's AZT project director, was reasonably confident that the study would run its full course. Said King before the results were known: "It's going to have...
...effect was indeed extraordinary. By mid-September there had been 16 deaths among the 137 patients receiving the placebo and only one among the 145 taking AZT. Those being given the drug developed fewer AIDS-associated infections, gained weight and showed growing numbers of helper T cells (the immune-system cells attacked by the AIDS virus) in their bloodstream. The independent review board of AIDS experts, set up by a division of the National Institutes of Health in February, promptly recommended that the study be halted and the drug given to the placebo patients...
...AZT was first synthesized in 1964 by Jerome Horwitz of the Michigan Cancer Foundation as a possible anticancer drug. But it proved ineffective against tumors and was largely forgotten until 1984, after Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris independently isolated the AIDS virus...
Scientists at Burroughs Wellcome suspected that the long-unused AZT might be what was needed to stop the AIDS virus. They discovered that when the drug enters a human cell, it is converted by a human enzyme into a "false sugar" ) that resembles, but is not identical to, the sugar used by the AIDS virus' reverse transcriptase to help build a DNA strand. If the AIDS enzyme mistakenly adds a false sugar molecule to the DNA chain, DNA synthesis is halted. So, they reasoned, further reproduction of the virus would be stopped...
...request of Burroughs Wellcome, Samuel Broder and his colleagues at NCI and other institutions tested AZT in late 1984 and early 1985 on AIDS- infected human cells in the test tube and found that it seemed to interfere with viral reproduction. Subsequently, they began testing the drug on 19 AIDS and ARC victims, and early this year reported in the British journal Lancet that the subjects had shown remarkable improvement. There was, however, at least one troublesome side effect: a reduction in their blood-cell counts. It was as a result of this early work that Burroughs Wellcome requested...