December 20, 2010
Eugene Goldwasser, Biochemist Behind an Anemia Drug, Dies at 88
By ANDREW POLLACK

Eugene Goldwasser, a largely unsung biochemist whose 20-year pursuit of an elusive protein led to the development of a widely used anemia drug that became one of the biggest products of the biotechnology industry, died Friday at his home in Chicago. He was 88.

The cause was kidney failure caused by a recurrence of prostate cancer, his son James said.

In the late 1970s, Dr. Goldwasser, working at the University of Chicago, isolated and purified erythropoietin, or Epo, a protein that spurs the body to produce red blood cells. And he shared his precious material with a young biotechnology company, which figured out how to produce larger amounts of the protein using genetic engineering.

That company, Amgen, became the world’s biggest biotechnology company on the basis of Epo. Sales of the protein under names like Epogen, Procrit and Aranesp amount to billions of dollars a year for Amgen, as well as for Johnson & Johnson and Roche.

Most people undergoing kidney dialysis now receive Epo, helping to relieve them of severe anemia, which can sap them of energy. Many cancer patients also get the drug to combat anemia caused by chemotherapy.

“It just continually delighted him that the work he did ended up having an impact on patients,” said Dr. Gary Toback, a friend and colleague of Dr. Goldwasser’s at the University of Chicago.

Epo has also been used surreptitiously by athletes, most notoriously Tour de France bicycle racers, to increase their endurance. In addition, recent studies have suggested that overuse of the drug can harm patients. Sales, as a result, have declined over the last few years.

While Epo has meant huge profits for drug companies, Dr. Goldwasser, whom colleagues described as quiet and self-effacing, won neither fame nor fortune. Although he notified his university about his accomplishment, it never patented Epo, and Dr. Goldwasser did not follow up.

“One percent of one percent of the drug’s annual revenues would have funded my lab quite handsomely,” he told a university publicist years later.

Eugene Goldwasser was born in Brooklyn in 1922. When his father’s clothing business failed during the Depression, the family moved to Kansas City, Mo., to join a relative in a similar business. After attending high school and a community college there, he transferred as a junior to the University of Chicago on a scholarship, earning a bachelor’s degree and, in 1950, a doctorate in biochemistry.

As far back as 1906, two French researchers had postulated the existence of a substance that prompts the production of red blood cells, which carry oxygen to the body’s tissues. But if that substance did exist, it was in such minuscule quantities that no one could find it.

Dr. Goldwasser began to look for it in 1955 at the urging of his mentor, the noted hematologist Leon O. Jacobson. “I estimated several months should see the task completed,” Dr. Goldwasser recalled in 1996 in an essay in the journal Perspectives in Biology and Medicine.

Instead it took 20 years. In 1957, Dr. Goldwasser and colleagues, by systematically removing different organs from rats to see if they became anemic, concluded that Epo was made in the kidneys. That helped explain why patients with kidney failure became anemic.

Figuring that animals with anemia would produce more Epo, making the protein easier to find, Dr. Goldwasser spent years visiting a slaughterhouse outside Chicago, injecting sheep with a chemical that would make them anemic. He would collect the blood and try to separate out the various components.

But it turned out that Epo would be easier to find in urine than in blood. In 1973, when his search seemed to be at a dead end, Dr. Goldwasser received a letter from Takaji Miyake of Kumamoto University in Japan, who had been collecting urine from people with a disease called aplastic anemia.

At the end of 1975, Dr. Miyake met Dr. Goldwasser in the lobby of the elegant Palmer House hotel in Chicago. He bowed low and held out a foot-square package wrapped in brightly colored silk, according to the book “The $800 Million Dollar Pill” by Merrill Goozner, which recounts the history of Epo.

Inside was the dried concentrate of 2,550 liters, or about 674 gallons, of urine.

From that material, Dr. Goldwasser, his assistant Charles Kung and Dr. Miyake purified 8 milligrams, or about 3 ten-thousandths of an ounce, of Epo, enough to fill a small vial. They published a paper in 1977.

Such a difficult extraction process was not practical for producing enough Epo to use as a drug. But the age of gene splicing was dawning. Knowing some of the protein’s composition, Fu-Kuen Lin, a scientist at Amgen, was eventually able to clone the human gene for Epo. The gene was spliced into hamster cells, which churned out enough Epo to sell as a drug.

The drug was tested first in patients undergoing dialysis, who suffered debilitating anemia. The only treatment at that time was frequent blood transfusions, which exposed patients to infectious diseases and to a dangerous buildup of iron in their livers.

Epo was “a spectacular success,” said Dr. John W. Adamson, who conducted that first trial around 1985 while at the University of Washington. Patients who had so little energy they had to crawl up stairs became fully functional, he said. Nowadays, owing to Epo, such horribly anemic dialysis patients have “essentially disappeared,” said Dr. Adamson, who is now at the University of California, San Diego.

Amgen patented the Epo gene, barely beating out another company, and through litigation has preserved its monopoly for more than 20 years.

Some companies wanting to sell their own versions of Epo have complained that by choosing to work only with Amgen, Dr. Goldwasser, whose research was financed by the National Institutes of Health, had essentially privatized public property. In his 1996 essay, Dr. Goldwasser said he had gotten permission for this from the N.I.H.

Dr. Goldwasser continued research on Epo, retiring from the university in 2002.

He is survived by his second wife, Deone Jackman; three sons from his first marriage, Thomas, of San Francisco, Matthew, of Chicago, and James, of New York; two stepchildren, Tara and Tom Jackman; and seven grandchildren. His first wife, Florence Cohen, died in 1981.

Dr. Goldwasser said in his 1996 essay that when he started his quest he had no idea the results would be so medically useful. “The enormous clinical success of Epo still astonishes me,” he wrote.

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