Fritz Schönhöfer

Fritz Schönhöfer (born January 1, 1892 in Speyer as Karl Friedrich Schönhöfer , † February 11, 1965 in Wuppertal ) was a German chemist at the Bayer plants (Wuppertal-Elberfeld), known for the development of various chemotherapeutic agents.

Life

Schönhöfer was the son of a senior engineer and attended the Ludwigshafen secondary school (Abitur 1913). He studied chemistry up to his doctorate and was with Bayer from 1921.

In 1928 he received the Emil Fischer Medal with Werner Schulemann and August Wingler (1898–1960) . Together with the pharmacologists Schulemann and Wilhelm Roehl and his chemist colleague Wingler at Bayer, he was involved in the development of the first synthetically manufactured anti-malarial drug, plasmochine - a quinoline derivative. Introduced into medical practice in 1926 and launched in 1927, it is now obsolete thanks to more effective and less toxic agents. He was also involved in the development of atebrine (malaria prophylaxis), which was often used together with plasmochin. Plasmochin avoided the serious, sometimes fatal side effects (blackwater fever) of quinine, but had serious side effects even at high doses. It acted on the gametes of the malaria pathogen. Atebrine was the United States' preferred antimalarial agent during World War II.

The development of plasmochin at Bayer in 1924/25 was also an early example of rational drug development (as opposed to random screening, for example). The Bayer chemists started with the quinoline skeleton and added side chains that they suspected might be effective in alleviating side effects, for example. Schönhöfer and Wingler also carried out further research on similar substances in the working group they led. Schönhofer later worked with Hans Andersag , who in 1934 developed the antimalarial drug Resochin, called chloroquine in the USA. Schönherr also worked at Bayer with Roehl's successor as pharmacologist Walter Kikuth .

The clinical effectiveness of Plasmochin was tested by Peter Mühlens (1874-1943) from the Hamburg Tropical Institute on malaria patients and by Franz Sioli (1882-1949) on paralysis patients at the psychiatric institution in Düsseldorf-Grafenberg, which he directed.

Schönhofer was later a lecturer at the University of Erlangen and had the title of professor. In 1948 he was editor of the volume Chemotherapy of the FIAT Review of German Science (Wiesbaden, Dieterich 1948), a series of publications organized by the Allies in which German scientists presented their work during the Second World War.

He is the father of Peter Schönhöfer .

literature

• Horst-Bernd Dünschede Tropical medicine research at Bayer , Düsseldorf: Triltsch 1971

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birth register StA Speyer, No. 2/1892
2. ↑ Death register StA Wuppertal-Elberfeld, No. 390/1965
3. ↑ 6-methoxy-8 (-diethyl-amino-isopentylamino) -quinoline- embonate (or also given as N-diethyl-amino-iso-pentyl-8-amino-t-methoxychinoline, Eschenbruch and others. Drugs of the 20th century , transcript Verlag 2009, p. 147). Also called pamaquin.
4. ↑ Leo Slater Molecularization and infectious disease research: the case of synthetic antimalarial drugs in the twentieth century , in Caroline Hannaway Biomedicine in the Twentieth Century: Practices, Policies, and Politics , IOS Press 2008, pp. 287-316.
5. ↑ Developed from atabrine. The effect against malaria was overlooked or not pursued at Bayer, possibly because of incorrect assumptions about toxicity (Walter Slater War and Disease. Biocmedical research on Malaria in the twentieth century , 2009, p. 81). Instead, the closely related (addition of a methyl group to chloroquine) Sontochin was developed and tested in 1939.
6. ↑ mostly due to syphilis. There, side effects of the drugs could be uncovered, even if they were not malaria patients.