Erich Haack

Erich Haack (born March 7, 1904 in Metz ; † March 1, 1968 ) was a German chemist .

Erich Haack studied chemistry and received his doctorate in 1928 at the University of Bonn with a dissertation on the constitution of halochromic compounds . Later he worked in the field of industrial drug research , especially in the field of antidiabetic drugs . In 1939 he developed the first sulfonylurea drug with the active ingredient sulfacarbamide at the von Heyden drug company in Radebeul , which was launched in 1943 as Euvernil. He headed research at the Heyden Chemical Factory, where he had acquired his first knowledge of sulfonylureas as sulfonamides with hypoglycemic side effects, but left the GDR in 1952. From 1953 he was with CF Boehringer & Sons in Mannheim, where he later became managing director and head of research. From 1967 he held an honorary professorship at the University of Heidelberg .

Auguste Loubatières first discovered that certain sulfonamides lower blood sugar levels ( hypoglycemia ) by increasing the release of insulin in Montpellier in the 1930s . At the time, sulfonamides were primarily studied as antibiotics. It was already used to treat diabetes in France in the 1940s, but this was initially ignored in Germany (the work was started by some scientists in the USA at that time). These substance classes only found their breakthrough as anti-diabetes agents in the mid-1950s. Haack noticed the lowering of blood sugar levels as an undesirable side effect in the case of sulfonylurea derivatives at the von Heyden company on the antibiotic Loranil, which had been further developed from Euvernil, but this could be counteracted by sugar consumption. In spite of this, the GDR Ministry of Health banned approval in 1951 and prohibited further research (which was one of the reasons for Haack's departure to the West, where he continued his research). A carbutamide synthesized by Haack's colleague Ernst Carstens (1915–1986) was subjected to clinical tests by Hellmuth Kleinsorge , which he presented at a conference on metabolic diseases in Bad Homburg in 1955 and published in 1956 in the medical weekly. Even Karl Joachim Fuchs and his teacher Hans Franke from the Auguste-Viktoria Hospital in Berlin reported about the same time of such clinical trials (the test substance also gave Haack) and also Ferdinand Bertram in Hamburg. In 1956 the resulting oral anti-diabetes drugs came onto the market, among others from Boehringer in Mannheim (initially Oranil) and Hoechst (Rastinon) as well as Haack's old company von Heyden in the GDR.

Awards

• 1960 Adolf von Baeyer commemorative coin from the Society of German Chemists

Web links

• Literature by and about Erich Haack in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biographical note from the University of Heidelberg

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Information in his dissertation
2. ↑ H. Kleinsorge: Carbutamide - The first oral antidiabetic . In: Experimental and Clinical Endocrinology & Diabetes . tape 106 , no. January 02 , 1998, p. 149–151 ( PDF DOI = 10.1055 / s-0029-1211968).
3. ^ Hans Schadewaldt, in: Dietrich von Engelhardt (ed.), Diabetes in Medizin- und Kulturgeschichte, Springer 1989, p. 100ff