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CVS COVID-19 Vaccine Near Columbus OH
www.cvs.comPharmacy LocationBy appointment only2532 East Main Street(614) 235-30242929 Stelzer Road(614) 337-62104801 West Broad Street(614) 878-75651500 Lockbourne Road(614) 449-97713355 East Livingston Avenue(614) 237-37372680 North High Street(614) 267-56074280 Morse Road(614) 473-1123The following is a table of drugs organized by their year of discovery. Naturally occurring chemicals in plants, including alkaloids, have been used since pre-history. In the modern era, plant-based drugs have been isolated, purified and synthesised anew.
- Overview
- Rational approach
- The final jewel
Fifty years ago, few scientists believed a drug could fight viruses with low side effects. Then Gertrude Elion showed the doubters "what I could do on my own."
Born in 1918 in Manhattan, Gertrude Elion developed the drug acyclovir, a potent inhibitor of herpes viruses with remarkably low toxicity, which her team unveiled in 1978.
When news broke in April that the drug remdesivir had been shown to speed recovery in patients hospitalized with COVID-19, Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, hailed the finding as “an important proof of concept” in the race to bring the pandemic to heel.
Unlike a vaccine, which prompts the body to mount a defense against invading viruses, remdesivir is an antiviral drug, which hampers the ability of a virus to replicate and spread. For now, results related to remdesivir are mixed, although some studies continue to suggest the drug can improve outcomes for patients with severe forms of COVID-19. Still, only a few decades ago, most scientists doubted such a thing was even possible—that a tiny, parasitic particle wholly reliant on a host cell to reproduce could be inhibited without harm to the cell itself.
Now, antivirals are used to treat herpes, hepatitis, HIV, Ebola, and more. And arguably, none would exist today were it not for Gertrude “Trudy” Elion.
Born in 1918 in Manhattan, Elion overcame early financial hardship and outright sexism to win the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, becoming only the fifth woman to do so. She shared the award with her longtime collaborator George Hitchings, who hired her in 1944 to join his biochemistry lab at the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome (now part of GlaxoSmithKline).
Elion was just 19 years old when she graduated summa cum laude from Hunter College in 1937 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. Her parents, immigrants from Eastern Europe, were bankrupted by the Great Depression. They couldn’t pay for their daughter’s graduate education, and none of the programs to which she’d applied would offer her financial aid.
Worse, it seemed no matter how well she’d done in school, research laboratories wouldn’t hire a woman. As she recalled years later, on more than one occasion she was told that, though she was qualified for the position, she would be “a distracting influence” on the laboratory staff.
Nevertheless, Elion persisted, taking temporary jobs and living at home to save up money. She worked as a food analyst for a grocery chain, answered phones at a doctor’s office, and taught chemistry in New York City high schools while pursuing her master’s degree at New York University on nights and weekends.
Finally, thanks to labor shortages created by World War II, real opportunities started coming her way, first with Johnson & Johnson and then with Burroughs Wellcome.
Up until the 1970s, most new drugs were found by trial-and-error or stumbled upon serendipitously. Take Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin, which revolutionized the treatment of bacterial infections. Or the chance observation by a French army surgeon, Henri Laborit, that an anesthetic called chlorpromazine had a calming effect on patients with schizophrenia, the first in of a series of breakthroughs in psychiatric medication.
Hitchings proposed another way forward—a rational, scientific approach to drug discovery based on knowledge of a biological target. He hypothesized that scientists could inhibit pathogen cells from replicating by making defective copies of their genetic building blocks. Once these copies were integrated into the germ’s metabolic pathways, they would jam up the cellular machinery, interfering with the reactions necessary for DNA synthesis.
The first approved antivirals didn’t arrive on the market until the early 1960s, and all fell far short of expectations. As one history of antivirals observed, the early versions of these drugs were “somewhere between cancer chemotherapeutic principles and folk medicine.” Highly toxic and minimally effective, they merely confirmed what most scientists had long assumed: Because virus and cell are so inextricably intertwined, viral diseases simply couldn’t be treated.
Acyclovir was the drug that changed everything in the effort to develop effective antivirals.
ByKeith JeromeUniversity of Washington
At one time, Elion might well have agreed. Back in 1948, she had noticed that a compound she’d synthesized for the treatment of cancer—2,6-diaminopurine—had shown impressive antiviral activity. She was intrigued but became discouraged by the drug’s toxicity, and ultimately shelved it to focus on other work.
In 1968, shortly after Hitchings had left the lab to become vice president of research, Elion came across a report that something similar to 2,6-diaminopurine had recently shown antiviral activity. The news “rang a bell,” she later said, prompting her and her team of “diligent and devoted scientists” to pick up where she’d left off two decades prior.
Over the next four years, they secretly studied a remarkable new compound they called acyclovir, working to unravel the mysteries of its activity and metabolism without alerting the competition to what they’d found.
An attenuated live oral polio vaccine was developed by Albert Sabin, coming into commercial use in 1961. Less than 25 years after the release of Salk's vaccine, domestic transmission of polio had been eliminated in the United States.
- Pfizer Inc. In March, Pfizer Inc. announced that a joint venture with BioNtech Se to develop and distribute BioNTech’s mRNA based COVID-19 vaccine candidate BNT-162.
- GlaxoSmithKline. GlaxoSmithKline has brought many vaccines to the market including vaccines for HPV and the seasonal flu. In February, they announced they will give access to it’s vaccine adjuvant platform to the University of Queensland.
- Inovio Pharmaceuticals. Inc Inovio have completed preclinical testing of their vaccine candidate INO-4800 and the company plans to begin 30 participant clinical trials in the U.S, China and South Korea in April.
- Johnson & Johnson. Johnson & Johnson is working with BARDA to develop a vaccine candidate. In March, the company said it had started preclinical testing on multiple candidates in Boston, and it aims to have a vaccine candidate by the end of the month.
Oct 2, 2023 · Researchers had already been working on developing mRNA vaccines before the pandemic, such as a vaccine for Ebola that didn’t receive much commercial interest. But in 2020, when COVID-19 began...
Oct 23, 2021 · There are more than 292 COVID-19 candidates’ vaccines being developed as of July 2021 of which 184 are in human preclinical trials. A patent provides protection and a marketing monopoly to the inventor of an invention for a specified period.
Pfizer Inc. ( / ˈfaɪzər / FY-zər) [ 3] is an American multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporation headquartered at The Spiral in Manhattan, New York City. The company was established in 1849 in New York by two German entrepreneurs, Charles Pfizer (1824–1906) and his cousin Charles F. Erhart (1821–1891).
