Sir David Jack: an extraordinary drug discoverer and developer

Abstract

Sir David Jack, FRS, was a remarkable man, driven by altruistic intent, a passionate and exceptional scientist, who was able to apply the full power of his impressive intellect to the discovery of new and important medicines for the benefit of patients in need. This involved not only a critical focus on basic discovery, but also the proper application of drug development sciences (pharmacology, drug metabolism, toxicology, analytical chemistry, chemical manufacturing, pharmaceutics and clinical medicine) to ensure that a sound scientific idea at the bench could be turned into the reality of a useful medicine for patients. His broad, applied and integrated approach to drug discovery is what makes David Jack stand out, even among others highly regarded and acknowledged for their contributions to medical research and drug discovery. In addition he was a great leader and commanded the respect of all who worked for him, no matter where they worked in the organization. All he asked was that each and every employee focused on the task in hand, namely to find ‘better medicines for the treatment of poorly-treated common diseases’. He repeatedly espoused the idea that if you did not know ‘how in general terms’ what you were doing might eventually lead to this end then you should not be doing it. If such focused efforts proved to be successful, patients would benefit and so would the company and the resulting revenue generated would provide yet more opportunity to find different or further improved medicines. With David’s vision and leadership an amazingly impressive number of important new medicines materialized from the Allen and Hanburys site at Ware, including inhaled beclamethasone diproprionate (Becotide®), fluticasone proprionate (Flixotide®), salbutamol/albuterol (Ventolin®) and salmeterol (Serevent®) for asthma therapy, labetalol (Trandate®) for hypertension, ranitidine (Zantac®) for gastric acid diseases, ondansetron (Zofran®) for the treatment of emesis associated with cancer chemotherapy and sumatriptan (Imigran®/Imitrex®) for the treatment of