Word: wurtman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Their efforts failed, but Richard Wurtman, an M.I.T. neurologist and Lilly consultant, took a different approach. Instead of using Prozac as a starting point, he turned to fenfluramine, a European weight-loss drug. Because fenfluramine acts on both serotonin and dopamine, it has the unfortunate side effect of putting its users to sleep. That is why doctors came up with fen/phen; the "phen" (phentermine) is an amphetamine-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...
...Wurtman was convinced that obesity must to some degree have a physiological basis. He had been doing research on the relationship between serotonin and appetite. Carbohydrates in the blood can help produce elevated levels of serotonin in the brain; Wurtman and his wife Judy, a nutritionist, theorized that eating high-carbohydrate food might be an unconscious attempt to elevate mood by giving the brain extra jolts of serotonin. "We reasoned," says Wurtman, "that people were using these foods as drugs." And because the best-tasting high-carbohydrate foods--ice cream, French fries, potato chips--are high in fat, the calories...
...Wurtmans were right, then a chemical that could generate a similar serotonin jolt might be highly effective for weight control. Wurtman began combing the medical literature for such a substance and discovered that the French pharmaceutical company Servier had discovered one called fenfluramine. "We tested it," he says, "and we found that it worked in selectively suppressing carbohydrate overeating...
Meanwhile, Servier had finally figured out how to produce pure dexfenfluramine, without its mirror-image molecule. This was a potentially profitable discovery, since the patent on fenfluramine was about to run out, and the new formulation could be considered a novel, patentable drug. Servier approached Wurtman in the late 1970s with a proposal that he purchase the U.S. rights to dexfenfluramine. Wurtman tested the drug, found it was indeed effective and agreed. The actual purchaser would be Interneuron Pharmaceuticals, a company co-founded by Wurtman to market discoveries by M.I.T. scientists. Interneuron subsequently licensed the drug to Wyeth-Ayerst...
...fact, there is more than one way to interpret the neurotoxicity research. For one thing, observes Wurtman, animals don't necessarily respond to drugs the way humans do. The toxic dose of Redux in a monkey is only twice the therapeutic dose, but the therapeutic dose in a monkey is much higher to start with--as much as 10 times that of a human. It's therefore highly unlikely, he says, that a human user would...