Steroid medicine innovation at Upjohn named National Historic Chemical Landmark

17 May 2019

"For many of us, life would be unimaginable without medicines that contain steroids,” says ACS Immediate Past President Peter K. Dorhout, Ph.D. “They include treatments for mosquito bites, arthritis, asthma, autoimmune diseases, skin conditions and even cancer. Many of these modern drug therapies would not be available today without the pioneering research and development that occurred at Upjohn over an incredible 60-year period starting in 1930. The medicinal chemistry innovations, microbial and chemical transformation discoveries, and manufacturing processes developed by Upjohn for its steroid medicine program transformed not only the pharmaceutical industry but also the entire field of synthetic organic chemistry.”
 

“Numerous pharmaceutical companies initiated industrial efforts to scale-up the production of cortisone and hydrocortisone in late 1949,” says Donald R. Parfet, retired Upjohn officer and great-grandson of company founder William E. Upjohn. “Among the companies in the race was The Upjohn Company in Kalamazoo, where knowledge of adrenal cortex extracts was considerable. By the mid-1950s the company had organized multiple teams to determine how best to optimize the synthesis of hydrocortisone for human clinical use. This effort led to Upjohn’s unsurpassed development and commercial production of many other corticosteroids and related compounds through a continuous string of chemical and microbiological discoveries by Kalamazoo scientists.”