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and then Sioli evaluated it in four neurosyphilis patients treated with vivax
malaria at a Dusseldorf clinic in 1935-1936. According to
Coatney (1963)
,
who cites post-war Allied intelligence reports from occupied Germany, Sioli
had dismissed resochin as 'too toxic for practical use in humans'. Resochin was
abandoned and Andersag quickly produced a methylated version of resochin,
which he called sontochin in 1936. By 1939, sontochin had been evaluated
in 1100 patients in Germany and Cameroon, and against all four species of
human plasmodia with good results. In July 1941 Bayer sent sontochin tablets
to the French firm Specia owned by Rhone-Poulenc. Some 5000 of these
tablets were in the hands of French clinical investigators in May 1943 when
the Allies liberated Tunis in North Africa.
According to
Coatney (1963)
, American scientists had already taken
notice of the 4-aminoquinolines and had independently taken special inter-
est in those chlorinated at the 7-position. Later they discovered that Win-
throp Chemical held a patent on the most active compound among those,
the one Bayer called resochin and the Americans had dubbed chloroquine.
Sontochin and chloroquine went to clinical trials under BCMS supervision
and chloroquine became therapy of choice for acute malaria of any species
in 1946 (
Most et al., 1946b
). An accounting of this history in a topic by
German authors, one in the employ of Bayer, agrees on all essential points
(
Jensen and Mehlhorn, 2009
).
A higher priority for the BMCS was the replacement of pamaquine
against relapse with less-toxic drugs.
Plasmodium vivax
caused five of six cases
of malaria in Allied troops, and a drug-drug interaction with atabrine had
forced them to stop using pamaquine against relapse (
Baird, 2011
;
Office of
the Surgeon General, 1943
). Allied troops were thus fully exposed to that
very serious threat. Moreover, relapse especially concerned the BMCS as a
means of reintroducing the then vanishing endemic vivax malaria into the
US via repatriation of several million service men and women. It is relevant
to understand that the one drug available against relapse today was borne
of serious concerns about not only the certainty and speed of military vic-
tory in the Pacific War but also a direct domestic public health threat to the
US (
Shannon, 1946
;
Clark, 1946
). The federal government resorted to the
use of prison inmate volunteers as experimental subjects in clinical trials of
antimalarials (
Alving et al., 1948
;
Coatney et al., 1948
), a practice that con-
tinued well into the 1960s. The development of radical cure against vivax
malaria required in that era, and still, does the mobilization of substantial
technical, financial and social capital. The drug they developed and licensed
- primaquine - required 8 years of heroic effort. Nonetheless, primaquine
