August 31, 1909: First Chemotherapy Drug Treats Syphilis 100th

by Tina Kells | August 31, 2009 at 09:35 am

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Among other things that happened in history on August 31, this date marks the 100th anniversary in medicine. On August 31, 1909 German physician Paul Ehrlich developed a treatment for syphilis using a chemotherapy drug. Ehrlich in fact coined the term chemotherapy to describe a medication that would strike only "parasitic cells" and not healthy cells in the body.

Through Paul Ehrlich's research syphilis was treated using the first known chemotherapy drugs. It would be more than half a century later before this class of drug was developed and used in the treatment of cancer. Ehrlich is considered a pioneer in immunology and chemotherapy and in 1908 won a Nobel Prize for his work.

After searching through hundreds of potential chemicals, a German immunologist discovers a compound that can selectively kill the parasitic spirochete that causes syphilis. The following year, he sends 65,000 free samples of the drug, now known as the first modern chemotherapy agent, to doctors all over the world.

Since his research career began in the 1870s, German physician Paul Ehrlich had been searching for chemicals that could kill infectious microbes without harming their human hosts. He coined the term chemotherapy to describe the type of drug he was looking for, saying, “We must search for magic bullets. We must strike the parasites, and the parasites only, if possible, and to do this, we must learn to aim with chemical substances!”

In the early 1900s, Ehrlich began building a vast library of chemicals that he hoped might have specific bug-fighting powers. He started by studying the arsenic-like compound Atoxyl, known to kill syphilis but too toxic for use in humans. Ehrlich and his vast army of assistants from the Royal Institute of Experimental Therapy in Frankfurt began brewing hundreds of slight variations of the Atoxyl chemical.