Janet Rideout

Janet Rideout was a protégé of Gertrude Belle Elion’s and Rideout picked up her mentor’s tenacity in the search for new drugs. She was stalking a new, horrible killer: AIDS. Decades earlier, a chemical called azidothymidine, or AZT, had failed as a cancer drug. Rideout took a new look at AZT, and her research led to its becoming the first approved, effective treatment for AIDS.

About Her Life

Janet Rideout (born 1939) is a native of Vermont. As a child she learned to play sports with her father and was inspired by her grandmother, who owned her own lumber company. She became interested in science in high school and attended Mount Holyoke College, a school famous for producing women chemists. Her first plan was to become a teacher, but then she learned one of the best-kept secrets in education: not only is tuition for graduate school in chemistry often paid for by government agencies or private foundations, but graduate students actually get paid stipends high enough to live on. With no worries about how to pay for school and still put food on her table, she earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

After graduating, Rideout went to work for the drug company Burroughs Wellcome (now part of GlaxoSmithKline). There she worked under Gertrude Elion and was greatly influenced by the drug-treatment research methodology of Elion and George Hitchings (see Elion).

In the late 1970s a deadly new disease called acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, appeared on the scene. Scientists were having a difficult time figuring out how to treat people with the disease, which at the time was always fatal. Elion was one of the research scientists at Burroughs Wellcome working to find a cure for AIDS in the mid-1980s. AIDS is caused by a virus called the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Following the research principles developed by Elion and Hitchings, Rideout and her collaborators identified 14 known compounds that might interfere with the DNA of HIV, thus preventing the virus from reproducing in the body. Among the compounds was a drug called azidothymidine, or AZT, which was originally developed back in the 1960s as a potential cancer drug, but it did not work well and was abandoned by cancer researchers. Rideout and her fellow scientists ran their tests on the 14 potential AIDS drugs, and the tests showed AZT to be effective! In 1987 the drug was approved for use in humans by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

AZT is still one of the most important drugs for treating AIDS and HIV infection. It is even more effective today than when it was first used, because now it is normally used in combination with another family of drugs called protease inhibitors, developed by M. Katharine Holloway and Chen Zhao, among others.

After 26 years at Burroughs Wellcome, Rideout left to join a new company, Inspire Pharmaceuticals, based in Durham, North Carolina, where she continued to track down treatments for a variety of diseases. Her husband is also a chemist.