Word: interneuron
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...like drug that wakes the patient up again and boosts the metabolism to burn calories faster. Wurtman separated fenfluramine into its two component chemicals, levofenfluramine and dexfenfluramine. The latter has revealed itself to be a powerful weight-loss medication. He patented the drug for M.I.T., founded a company called Interneuron Pharmaceuticals to manufacture it under license to Wyeth-Ayerst and began moving the drug, dubbed Redux, through the FDA-approval process...
Some critics claim that Interneuron steamrollered Redux through the FDA and that the agency acted irresponsibly in approving it, charges that the company and the agency vigorously deny. What nobody on either side considered, though, was the possibility that either Redux or its parent compound fenfluramine might damage heart valves...
Much of this legal furor is being vented against Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories, a subsidiary of American Home Products, which makes fenfluramine and distributes dexfenfluramine, and Interneuron Pharmaceuticals, a small Lexington, Mass., firm founded by the M.I.T. neurologist who developed Redux. There's also talk of bringing action against the FDA--though federal law usually protects government officials from suits challenging routine performance of duties like approving drugs. Whatever the outcome of the legal battles, they leave unsettled larger societal questions--about Americans' infatuation with quick-fix remedies for whatever ails them, real or imagined, and their doctors' willingness to cater...
...absence, fruit-fly embryos sprout a coat of prickles) diffuses outward from the cells that produce it, becoming fainter and fainter. Columbia University neurobiologist Thomas Jessell has found that it takes middling concentrations of this potent morphing factor to produce a motor neuron and lower concentrations to make an interneuron (a cell that relays signals to other neurons, instead of to muscle fibers, as motor neurons...
...that time came, however, the anti-Redux forces were missing. The meeting had been scheduled--all too conveniently, they suggest--to coincide with an international neurosciences conference in San Diego. And at the second meeting, Redux won approval by a one-vote margin. That, along with the fact that Interneuron sent a high-profile member of its board of directors, Alexander Haig, to the November meeting in what was perceived as a high-pressure lobbying effort, led to charges that Redux was moved through improperly...