NEW DRUG FOUND

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22818, 27 August 1937, Page 8

NEW DRUG FOUND

HIGH VALUE CLAIMED blood stream diseases EXPERIMENTS IN LONDON [prom our ora correspondent! LONDON, August 7 The new drug para-aminobenzenesul-phouamido has been described as "epoch-making" ' and "one of the greatest discoveries of the century in chemotherapy." It was given a great deal of publicity as a result of the British Pharmaceutical Conference last week. Actually it has been in use for some months. Through its agency the mortality rate for puerperal fever in the Queen Charlotte Hospital, London, the centre of investigations, has fallen from 22 per cent to 8 per cent, while, as a delegate from China reported, it has been employed widely in that country and with most beneficial results. It was left, however, to a young re- _ search chemist, Dr. W. J. Dyke, of Evans' Biological Institute, Runcorn, to bring the discovery to general attention through his paper on the toxio effect of the drug on mice. Doctors and pharmacists at the conference, it is reported, all concurred in the view that the discovery is most important and far-reaching in its implications. It has been established already that it is an effective cure for diseases of the blood stream —puerperal sepsis, # erysipelas, tonsilitis, and other infections —but its potentialities have not yet been fully explored, and it is not improbable that its use may be extended to a much wider variety of diseases. Mr. T. E. Lescher, who was chairman of the conference, in discussing the evolution or the drug and the potentialities indicated by the results, described it as one of the three greatest discoveries in medicine in. the last 50 years—the other two being insulin and liver extract. Para-aminobenzenesulphonamide, in its present stato, he said, is a development of a chemical theory regarding dyestuffs and their uses as germicides expounded by a German scientist in 1935. That'theory was followed up by a group of British investigators, with the result that the drug was found to be fully effective and much more prompt in its action than in the earlier stage of its evolution.