Stewart Adams (pharmacologist)

Stewart Sanders Adams (born 1923 in Byfield , Northamptonshire , † January 30, 2019 in Nottingham ) was a British pharmacologist . He is considered the main developer of ibuprofen .

Adams left school at the age of 16 and from 1939 initially worked as an apprentice at the pharmaceutical company Boots , which financed him a university education . In 1945 he received his bachelor's degree in pharmacy from Nottingham University . At Boots he then worked on their penicillin production project and then in the research department on drugs for rheumatoid arthritis as an alternative to cortisone or acetylsalicylic acid in high doses (from 1953). He worked with the chemist John Nicholson (1925–1983), with whom he tried hundreds of substances. In 1952 he received his doctorate from the University of Leeds . From the beginning of the 1960s, a search was made for derivatives of arylpropionic acid , including what later became ibuprofen, which was first synthesized in December 1961. It was the only one of the substances tested to be successful in a clinical test and acted as an analgesic and antipyretic . Adams had previously also tested ibuprofen on himself. A patent was granted in 1962 and the substance was approved in the UK in 1969 and in the USA in 1974. In 1983 the drug became available without a prescription.

Adams became Head of Pharmaceutical Research at Boots and retired in 1983 but remained in an advisory capacity. Neither he nor Nicholson benefited from the financial success of ibuprofen.

In 1987 he became an officer of the OBE . In 2013 he became an Honorary Freeman of Nottingham. He was an honorary doctorate from Nottingham University.

Web links

• Julia Robinson: The Ibuprofen inventor. In: The Pharmaceutical Journal. February 22, 2016 (English).