The result was tetracycline, a powerful antibiotic with fewer side effects than the drug from which it was derived — proof, Dr. Conover wrote,
that “a superior drug could be made by chemical modification.”
Virtually all antibiotics today are semisynthetic, meaning they are chemically altered
to increase the number of infections that can be treated or to reduce side effects.
At Pfizer, Dr. Conover was assigned to a team working to determine the chemical structures of the antibiotics oxytetracycline
and chlortetracycline — a project that laid the groundwork for Dr. Conover’s discovery.
Dr. Conover started his research at Pfizer in Brooklyn in 1950, when pharmaceutical companies, spurred by the success
of penicillin against battlefield infections during World War II, were racing to find new antibiotics.
A federal appeals court in Philadelphia finally affirmed the patent — and, by extension, the
licensing agreements — in 1982, three decades after Dr. Conover invented tetracycline.
Lloyd Conover, Inventor of Groundbreaking Antibiotic, Dies at 93 -
By DENISE GELLENEMARCH 12, 2017
Lloyd H. Conover, a chemist whose breakthrough invention of one of the most effective
and widely prescribed antibiotics, tetracycline, led to a whole new approach to developing such drugs, died on Saturday in St. Petersburg, Fla.
His death was confirmed by his son Craig.
