Word: uclaf
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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PARIS: Bowing to boycott threats from American anti-abortion groups, European pharmaceutical giant Hoechst transferred non-U.S. patent rights to the abortion pill RU-486 to one of the doctors who invented it. Although Edouard Sakiz, who headed Roussel Uclaf, the company that lead the development of RU-486 before it was acquired by Hoechst, will market the drug worldwide through a new company, he said he will not do business in the U.S. Once the drug wins approval, it will be distributed by The Population Council, a New York-based non-profit that received the U.S. patent from...
Only a few years ago, it looked as if American women might never have access to RU-486, whose chemical name is mifepristone. It has been available in Europe since 1988, but the French manufacturer, Roussel Uclaf, fearing harassment by militant antiabortionists, refused to market it in the U.S. In 1994, though, the New York City-based Population Council offered to take the heat and acquired the drug's American patent rights. After two years of clinical trials, the organization applied to the FDA for permission to sell the drug. In July an advisory committee recommended approval...
...convey either the scientific significance or the social controversy surrounding the U.S. clinical trials of the so-called abortion pill. Although an estimated 150,000 women in Europe have used mifepristone (known there by its brand name, RU 486), the threat of consumer boycotts by antiabortion organizations discouraged Roussel Uclaf, the drug's European manufacturer, from marketing the pills in America. Instead, the company eventually agreed to let the Population Council, a nonprofit group, sponsor clinical trials of mifepristone in the U.S. Last month tests began at some of the 12 sites around the country, five of them Planned Parenthood...
...ABORTION DRUG HAS BEEN A source of controversy ever since its invention was announced in 1982 by Baulieu, a French physician who worked as a researcher at Roussel Uclaf. The concept was rather simple: RU 486, an antiprogestin, could break a fertilized egg's bond to the uterine wall and thus induce a miscarriage. An injection two days later of prostaglandin, a hormone-like substance, would force uterine contractions and speed the ejection of the embryo. It took six more years and tests on more than 17,000 women before the French government announced that RU 486 would be made...
...news spawned furious reaction in the press, an outpouring of outraged letters from Roman Catholic doctors, and a church-sponsored protest through the streets of Paris. A month later, a shaken Roussel Uclaf yanked the drug from the market, saying the company did not want to engage in a "moral debate...