Stewart Adams spent a large chunk of his life searching for a cure for rheumatoid arthritis. He failed in that endeavor, a regret he never really got over. But he did invent an effective treatment for arthritis, called ibuprofen, which is known in the US by the brand names Motrin and Advil. That ibuprofen is used for a wide variety of pain relief is Adams' greatest achievement.
Adams began his research by studying how aspirin worked, which no one else was doing at the time. He was interested in the drug’s anti-inflammatory properties and hoped to find something that mimicked those qualities but didn’t cause an allergic reaction, bleeding or stomach irritation like aspirin could.
Adams recruited Nicholson, a chemist, to help him test more than 600 different compounds in hopes of finding one that could reduce inflammation and that most people could tolerate. They narrowed down the field to five drugs. The first four went into clinical trials and all failed. The fifth, though, proved to be successful. They received a U.S. patent for ibuprofen in 1966. Three years later, it was approved as a prescription drug in England and soon became available around the world as an over-the-counter pain reliever.
Which brings us to that day in 1971, when Adams had to deliver an important speech at a pharmacological convention in Moscow. The problem was, he had spent the night before toasting ibuprofen's success with vodka. Read the story of Stewart Adams and the development of ibuprofen at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Derrick Coetzee)
