(suspenseful music)
- The discovery that Penicillin could kill bacteria ranks
up there with splitting the atom or
the moon landing,
a giant leap forward in human progress
and life expectancy.
But there were other wonder drugs
to be discovered that could attack other great pathogens
that have plagued humanity from millennia.
We've all been living through a new threat to our lives.
This time caused by a virus.
During the coronavirus pandemic life expectancy
in the US fell by one year.
Viruses are much smaller than bacteria,
a hundred million can fit on
a pinhead and antibiotics can't attack them.
Slipping inside a host cell,
they reproduce by hijacking the cell's own machine.
And most viruses eventually destroy their host cell.
Influenza, Ebola,
and COVID-19 are all caused by viruses,
notoriously hard to study and even harder to treat.
But by the 1970s a pioneer called Gertrude Elion,
began using new scientific methods
to custom build effective antiviral drugs.
Gertrude Elion was born in New York City in 1918
to immigrant parents.
She lost her grandfather to cancer
and her fiance to a bacterial infection
of the heart. - I had determined
when I was 15 years old
that I was going to be a scientist.
I entered college at that age
and I was gonna be a chemist.
And what's more,
I was going to find a cure for cancer.
- In 1944,
Elion joined the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome.
- We were at a very exciting era
of biochemistry. - Right.
- We were finding out things so rapidly
and things were progressing with such excitement.
And it was only a question of time
before we would really hit the gold.
- She started working with Dr. George Hitchings.
Together, they were amazingly prolific.
In terms of drug development,
they were a dream team.
So how did they do it?
Thank you so much.
All right this is my molecule building kit.
We're gonna need five nitrogen.
Hitchings and Elion realized that through careful study
of how our cells interact
with compounds and pathogens like viruses,
they could build highly efficient,
targeted drugs to do specific tasks.
So first we connect these three nitrogens.
This was a revelation,
building synthetic drugs,
atom by atom from the ground up.
In the 1970s,
Elion and her team built
a new drug that would revolutionize our approach
to tackling viruses.
Picture this,
Atlanta 1978, Trudy Elion is at
a conference filled
with expectant scientists.
It's the creme de la creme of drug makers and creators from
around the world.
She presents a paper on a miraculous new compound.
It's the first highly selective antiviral drug targeting
the herpes virus.
It's called Acyclovir.
It's unlike anything the world has ever seen before.
Thank you,
thank you so much.
Was there a sudden burst of applause?
Did the audience realize the magnitude
of what they were seeing?
I like to think so because this speech marked a milestone
in the history of human health.
Unlike the discovery
of Penicillin 50 years before,
it ushered in a new age of medicine,
this time targeting viruses.
(audience applauding)
Together, the work of Elion and Hitchings paved
the way for designer drugs,
helping to treat a huge range
of illnesses from leukemia to malaria to arthritis.
The techniques Trudy Elion developed
over her career provided a foundation
for many other researchers.
- Unfortunately I never got to meet her,
but I think her work certainly is inspirational.
Fleming gets the credit for,
you know,
discovering Penicillin by serendipity.
But these folks did it by rational design.