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Without a doctorate, she and George Hitchings designed drugs to block DNA building blocks. Their 6-mercaptopurine of 1951 remains part of the cure for childhood leukaemia; she won the Nobel Prize in 1988.
Gertrude Elion (1918-1999) was turned away from graduate programmes and laboratory jobs as a woman before joining George Hitchings at Burroughs Wellcome in 1944. Rather than screening compounds at random, they studied differences in nucleic acid metabolism between normal and malignant cells and designed purine analogues to exploit them. 6-Mercaptopurine, synthesised in 1951 and approved in 1953, produced remissions in childhood leukaemia and is still given daily in maintenance therapy; thioguanine followed. The same programme produced azathioprine, which made organ transplantation possible, allopurinol for gout and tumour lysis, and aciclovir, the first selective antiviral. She shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Hitchings and James Black, and was the first woman inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
| Title | Journal | Year |
|---|---|---|
| The Purine Path to Chemotherapy | Science | 1989 |
| The Purine Path to Chemotherapy (Nobel Lecture) | Angewandte Chemie International Edition in English | 1989 |
| The purine path to chemotherapy | Bioscience Reports | 1989 |
Shares Rare and paediatric cancers without markets, Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, Cytotoxic chemotherapy and the tags hero, pioneer.
Shares Rare and paediatric cancers without markets, Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, Cytotoxic chemotherapy and the tags hero, pioneer.
Shares Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, Cytotoxic chemotherapy and the tags hero, pioneer.
Shares Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, Cytotoxic chemotherapy and the tags hero, pioneer.
Shares Cytotoxic chemotherapy and the tags hero, pioneer.
Shares the tags hero, pioneer.
Shares the tags hero, pioneer.
Shares the tags hero, pioneer.