Abstract
THE fourth meeting of the Fine Chemicals Group of the Society of Chemical Industry was held at King's College London, on January 18, with Sir Jack Drummonct the chair. A discussion on "The Approach to the Chemotherapy of Tuberculosis" was opened by papers by Dr. James Walker and Dr. P. M. D'Arcy Hart, both of the National Institute for Medical Research. Dr. James Walker said that the limited knowledge of the metabolic processes of the tubercle bacillus has made an empirical approach to chemotherapy inevitable; but research has been aided by the use of wetting agents, such as 'Tween 80', and the addition of serum albumin to liquid media, which make it possible to obtain visible growths from minute inocula of the organism. Compounds at present under trial include the sulphones, which probably exert their action in the body by slow hydrolysis to di-amino-diphenylsulphone; the diphenylamine o-carb-oxylic acids which act as antioxidants in certain biological oxidation mechanisms, and which have shown some inhibitory activity in vitro ; and the di-alkylsuccinic acids and other substances with lipophilic terminal groups, which may aid penetration of the drugs into the lipoid-rich bacillus. Various antibiotics have been tried against the tubercle bacillus, the best so far being streptomycin.
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Chemotherapy of Tuberculosis. Nature 163, 698 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163698a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163698a0