REVIVING AN OLD DRUG

Abstract

IT S NOT OFTEN THAT SOMEONE CAN further a company's ambitions while advancing a more personal project at the same time. But if Paul Rubin is successful in commercializing the asthma drug zileuton, he will have managed to accomplish both of these goals. Rubin is president and chief executive officer of Critical Therapeutics Inc.(CTI), a small biopharmaceutical company in Lexington, Mass. And in his dual quest, he is leveraging two strengths from his past: an intimate knowledge of zileuton and a good working experience with the pharmaceutical services firm Rhodia Pharma Solutions. From 1987 until 1993, Rubin, a medical doctor, was in charge of a group at Abbott Laboratories responsible for the development of zileuton. When the drug was approved in 1996 as Zyflo, it became the only Food & Drug Administration-approved product that works by blocking the activity of 5-lipoxygenase, the main enzyme responsible for the formation of a family ...