Corticosteroid: Encyclopedia II - Corticosteroid - History

Corticosteroid - History

Tadeus Reichstein together with Edward Calvin Kendall and Philip Showalter Hench were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1950 for their work on hormones of the adrenal cortex which culminated in the isolation of cortisone.

Corticosteroids have been used as a drug treatment for some time. Lewis Sarett of Merck & Co. was the first to synthesize cortisone, using a complicated 36-step process that started with desoxycholic acid, which was extracted from ox bile. The low efficiency of converting deoxycholic acid into cortisone led to a cost of US $200 per gram. Russell Marker, at Syntex, discovered a much cheaper and more convenient starting material, diosgenin from wild Mexican yams. His conversion of diosgenin into progesterone by a four-step process now known as Marker Degradation was an important step in mass production of all steroidal hormones, including cortisone and the birth control pill. In 1952, D.H. Peterson and H.C. Murray of Upjohn Co. developed a process that used Rhizopus mold to oxidize progesterone into a compound that was readily converted to cortisone. The ability to cheaply synthesize large quantities of cortisone from the diosgenin in yams resulted in a rapid drop in price to US $6 per gram, falling to $0.46 per gram by 1980. The research of Percy Julian also aided progress in the field. The exact nature of cortisone's anti-inflammatory nature remained a mystery for years after however, until the leukocyte adhesion cascade was fully understood in the early 1980s.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki