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About Her Life
Gertrude Belle Elion (1918–1999), known to her friends as Trudy, was born in New York City, the daughter of a successful dentist. A shy young woman, Elion was an excellent student, and her parents encouraged her to attend college. Her dedication to fighting disease was strengthened when, soon after her graduation from Hunter College in 1937 with a degree in chemistry, her fiancé died of subacute bacterial endocarditis, an inflammation of the heart valves and inner lining.
Elion knew that she needed to have a Ph.D. to do laboratory research. However, despite her excellent academic record, she was unable to get either a graduate fellowship or an assistantship, and so she began to look for a job. There, too, she had a great deal of difficulty, mostly owing to gender discrimination. At one point she enrolled in secretarial school to learn some practical skills. After a series of temporary jobs Elion decided to volunteer her time in a chemistry laboratory; six months after she started, she was put on the payroll. Having saved enough money after a year and a half, Elion enrolled at New York University (NYU) in the graduate program in chemistry, working part-time as a doctor's receptionist and later as a substitute teacher to help pay the expenses. Nights and weekends were spent in the laboratory at NYU, doing research.
With World War II going on, jobs in chemistry were beginning to open up for women because of the scarcity of male workers. Armed with her NYU master’s degree (she never did complete her Ph.D.), Elion took a job testing food products for A&P grocery stores. She learned a lot but left when the position became too routine. She was then hired by Johnson & Johnson to make sulfa drugs, the most successful compounds to fight bacteria before penicillin was developed, but the lab closed after six months. In 1944 she joined Burroughs Wellcome (now GlaxoSmithKline) in Tuckahoe, a suburb of New York City, intending to stay only as long as she continued to learn new things. Elion remained with Burroughs Wellcome for the rest of her career, even when the company moved operations to North Carolina in 1970.
Elion’s supervisor at Burroughs Wellcome was George Hitchings. Hitchings believed in the need for a more rational method of research rather than the traditional trial-and-error method of drug discovery. He and Elion pursued this by working at the level of cells—discovering how various chemical substances function within them and then interfering with the chemical workings of cells, diseased cells in particular. Certain chemicals and their reactions are essential for cell growth. The nucleic acid DNA is among them; it contains the genetic code of an organism and helps in protein synthesis. Hitchings assigned Elion to investigate the role of a class of substances called purines in the healthy functioning of DNA in cells. Two purines, adenine and guanine, are building blocks of DNA. Elion and Hitchings discovered that cells could not produce their DNA without the presence of these purines. They reasoned that if they could prevent the incorporation of purines into DNA in “bad” cells, they could disrupt the growth and reproduction of these cells and stop them from spreading. So they set to work on developing compounds that prevented the incorporation of purines into DNA. They did this by “tricking” cells. They developed substances similar enough to DNA’s purines so that cells would incorporate them, but the substitutes couldn’t actually perform the duties of the real DNA purines, so cell growth would be inhibited. An important part of the challenge was to develop “substitutes” that would target only unwanted cells and not normal healthy cells.
By 1950 this line of research started to pay off. Elion had made two substances—diaminopurine and thioguanine—that proved to be effective treatments for leukemia, a blood cancer, by interfering with the growth of leukemia cells (abnormal white blood cells). Unfortunately, these drugs also had some undesirable effects. Tenacious in her hunt for a cure, Elion went on to discover 6-mercaptopurine (also known as 6-MP, trade name Purinethol). It was an improvement over the previous two drugs, but still the disease was not cured; patients went into remission but then relapsed and died. Elion decided to examine everything about 6-MP, devoting six years of her life to this research. As a result of her research, childhood leukemia today is treated with a combination of 6-MP and one of a dozen other drugs. During remission, drug therapy continues. This method of treatment cures the majority of patients.
After this success Elion and Hitchings developed a number of additional drugs related to 6-MP. Later, Elion discovered that these related drugs not only interfered with the reproduction of leukemia cells, but they also suppressed the immune system. This discovery led her to a new drug—azathioprine (Imuran)—and a new application—organ transplants. Imuran suppressed the immune system that would otherwise reject newly transplanted organs. For the first time, patients could receive organ transplants without their bodies rejecting the new organs.
In the 1960s Elion and Hitchings studied nucleic acid formation in bacteria and viruses. They determined that infectious diseases could be fought if drugs could be targeted to attack bacterial and viral DNA. This work resulted in pyramethamine, used to treat malaria, and trimethoprim (Septra), used to treat meningitis and bacterial infections of the urinary and respiratory tracts.
As a result of these overwhelming successes Hitchings was promoted by Burroughs Wellcome in 1967 to vice president of research, which ended his active participation in research. Elion, too, was promoted—to head of the Department of Experimental Therapy. Despite her new responsibilities, Elion continued her research and was essential in the development of acyclovir, an antiviral drug effective against herpes. Although the drug was originally synthesized by Howard Schaeffer, Elion determined exactly how and why it worked. Acyclovir, marketed as Zovirax, interferes with the replication process of the herpesvirus—and only the herpesvirus—proving that drugs can be selective.
Elion retired in 1983, though she remained active in her field, serving on the National Cancer Advisory Board and the Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research, consulting for Burroughs Wellcome, and working as a research professor in medicine and pharmacology at Duke University, among other activities. She never married or had children, but had many nieces and nephews whom she adored. She spent her retirement at her home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Along with Sir James W. Black, Elion and Hitchings received the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
(Adapted from: Bowden, Mary Ellen, Amy Beth Crow, and Tracy Sullivan. Pharmaceutical Achievers Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2002.)
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