Wonder drug inventor comes back to his alma mater

Dr Nick Lydon who developed the leukemia wonder drug Gleevec returned to his alma mater, the University of Dundee to deliver a lecture and to meet with one of the patients his drug cured - Ian Marsden, a commonwealth games athlete.

Dr Lydon delivered the cell signalling lecture at the Wellcome Trust Biocentre on 30 September where he met with Ian Marsden and spent some time talking with Ian about his treatment and recovery.

Nick Lydon studied for his PhD in the department of biochemistry between 1980 and 1984 under the supervision of Dr David Stansfield. After a short period with the Schering Pharmaceutical Company he joined Novartis where he started to develop Gleevec, leading the drug discovery programme until it entered human clinical trials in 1997.

Such was the efficacy of the drug when it was being tested that the clinical trails had to be stopped as it was unethical to give patients the placebo when those on Gleevec were showing rapid recovery. Gleevec switches off an enzyme called ABL which becomes abnormally active in nearly all cases of CML luekaemia. Gleevec combats CML and has cured thousands of patients with the disease. Patients in hospices with only two or three weeks to live frequently discharge themselves and go on holiday after taking the drug for a very short time.

Nick Lydon left Novartis in 1998 to set up his own biotechnology company Kinetix in Boston, Massachusetts. Three years later the company was taken over by Amgen, the world's largest and most successful biotechnology company, making Nick Lydon a multi-millionaire in the process. A few weeks ago he left the senior management of Amgen to join the biotechnology company Verizon in California.

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