Pubdate: Sun, 15 Dec 2013
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2013 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: William Yardley
Bookmark: http://mapinc.org/topic/Naloxone

JACK FISHMAN DIES AT 83; SAVED MANY FROM OVERDOSE

Dr. Jack Fishman helped create naloxone, a treatment that was more 
powerful and had fewer side effects than its predecessors.

Dr. Jack Fishman, who helped develop naloxone, a powerful medication 
that has saved countless people from fatal overdoses of heroin and 
other narcotics, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Remsenburg, N.Y. He was 83.

His death was confirmed by his son Howard. No cause was given.

Finding drugs to counter the addictive and potentially fatal use of 
heroin, morphine and other narcotics was an area of increasing 
research in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While some solutions were 
found to be somewhat effective, they had strong and even dangerous 
side effects and could be addictive themselves.

One researcher, Harold Blumberg of Endo Laboratories on Long Island, 
concluded that a safer, more effective drug could be derived from a 
new synthesized form of morphine. At the time, Dr. Fishman was on 
staff at what was then called the Sloan-Kettering Institute for 
Cancer Research, but he also worked part time at a private 
pharmaceutical lab run by Mozes J. Lewenstein, a colleague of Dr. 
Blumberg's. Dr. Fishman and Dr. Lewenstein helped figure out how to 
make the drug Dr. Blumberg had described.

Tests showed the drug, naloxone, to be far more powerful and to pose 
far fewer side effects than its predecessors.

In March 1961, Dr. Fishman and Dr. Lewenstein applied for one of the 
first patents for naloxone, with Dr. Lewenstein listed as the senior 
author. An early patent was also received by Sankyo, a Japanese company.

It took several years for the extent of the drug's benefits to become 
clear. In 1971, the Food and Drug Administration approved using 
naloxone to treat overdoses, and it is now found in hospitals, 
emergency rooms and the supplies of some emergency medical response 
teams. In recent years it has proved effective at stopping overdoses 
of OxyContin, Percocet, Vicodin and other prescription drugs.

Naloxone, called an "opioid antagonist," goes to the same place 
opioids go in the brain and puts up a shield, preventing them from 
shutting down respiratory and nervous system functions.

Several states have now made it legal for naloxone to be distributed 
by community support groups and local health clinics. Some groups 
distribute it directly to addicts so they can self-administer it if 
they fear an overdose.

"It really is a kind of miracle drug," Greg Scott, a sociology 
professor at DePaul University and the research director for the 
Chicago Recovery Alliance, told The New York Times in 2010.

Born Jacob Fiszman on Sept. 30, 1930, in Krakow, Poland, Mr. Fishman 
was 8 when he fled the Nazi occupation with his parents. He spent 
much of his youth in Shanghai, where he attended a Jewish school 
before moving to the United States when he was 18. He studied 
chemistry at Yeshiva University and graduated in 1950. He received a 
master's degree from Columbia in 1952 and a doctorate in chemistry in 
1955 from Wayne State University in Detroit.

Dr. Fishman's three previous marriages ended in divorce. In addition 
to Howard, his son from his first marriage, his survivors include his 
wife, Joy; three other sons, Neil, Leslie and Daniel, from his second 
marriage; a stepdaughter, Julie Stampler; 10 grandchildren; and a 
brother, Jerry.

Dr. Lewenstein died in 1966 and Dr. Blumberg in 1999.

Dr. Fishman also did prominent work in steroid research and the study 
of estrogen, including the role it can play in breast cancer. In 
1977, after teaching at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of 
Yeshiva University and serving as director of the Institute for 
Steroid Research at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, he became 
director of the biochemical endocrinology lab at Rockefeller 
University. He served until very recently as director of research at 
the Strang-Cornell Institute for Cancer Research.

In 1988, he became president of the Ivax Corporation, a 
pharmaceutical maker based in Miami. He has served on numerous boards 
and been a consultant to the World Health Organization and the 
National Science Foundation. He and Dr. Blumberg were given the John 
Scott Award for 1982. The award, one of the nation's oldest 
scientific honors given by the city of Philadelphia, said naloxone 
was "now the treatment of choice in reversing narcotic effects."
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