Word: prontosil
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Sulfanilamide, a dye introduced to U. S. pharmacologists last year under the trade names "Prontosil" and "Prontylin," has been found effective in blood poisoning, gonorrhea, childbed fever, erysipelas, cerebrospinal meningitis and other bacterial diseases (TIME, Dec. 28, et seq.). Last week conservative bacteriologists of the National Institute of Health announced that this astounding new drug seemed to be a cure for an entirely separate class of diseases, namely, those caused by viruses. Among virus diseases are the common cold, influenza, infantile paralysis, parrot fever. Another disease due to a virus is "benign lymphocytic choriomeningitis," which was recognized as a distinct...
...pharmacologists can ascertain, Prontosil does not attack the streptococci and staphylococci directly in the way that salvarsan ("606") inactivates the spirochete of syphilis. In some undeciphered manner Prontosil* stimulates the production of white blood corpuscles, guardians and scavengers of the blood stream, retards the growth of cocci...
...invention of this drug, which some responsible doctors last week were calling the medical discovery of the decade, were Professors Heinrich Horlein and Gerhard Domagk of the German Dye Trust. Dr. Horlein, director of the Trust's pharmaceutical research at Elberfeld, and Dr. Domagk, a chemotherapist, designed Prontosil's complex molecule of dyestuff. After Dye Trust synthetists made it. Dr. Domagk experimented on mice, found that it did not kill them, that it did cure them of streptococcic infections. Other German doctors tried the material on human beings, began to report success in 1935. Last June two London...
Last month Dr. Perrin Hamilton Long of Johns Hopkins risked criticism by presenting a brief, preliminary report concerning Prontosil to the Southern Medical Association. Up to last week the Journal of the American Medical Association, which has the biggest (95,200) circulation of all medical publications, printed not a word about Prontosil or Prontylin. Cautious Editor Morris Fishbein, who was educated to be a pathologist, has on at least one previous occasion nearly scorched his editorial nose by prematurely poking it into news of chemical drugs. It will be a long time before he forgets publishing in his Journal...
Like dinitrophenol, Prontosil is an aro matic coal tar product. Prontosil's full chemical formula is the disodium salt of 4-sulph-amido-phenyl-2-azo-7-acetylamino-1-hydroxynaphthalene 3.6-disulfonic acid. All doctors fear new drugs derived from coal tar. They may exhibit unexpected deadliness. In the case of Prontosil, since like dinitrophenol it affects the production of white blood cells, it comes under the medical rule of thumb: what ever stimulates may also destroy. And it may be that the new drug by which Dr. Tobey cured Franklin Roosevelt Jr.'s septic sore throat...