DiscoveryTaxol was first discovered by Monroe Wall, a medicinal chemist, and his junior colleague Mansukh Wani. But the person who delivered the yew samples was Arthur Barclay, a 32 year old botanist who was working for the U. S. Department of Agriculture.
The whole discovery began in 1960, when the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and US Department of Agriculture began a joined venture to hopes of finding compounds in plants that could be helpful as medicines. During this search, yews in the Pacific Northwest, called pacific yew trees, were sampled. After extensive analyses and screening against numerous tumors, the compound taxol and its high potentiality was discovered, which proved to be very promising against breast and ovarian cancer. Finally, in 1977, taxol was selected for clinical trial by the Division of Cancer Treatment. |