Hoffmann, We Have a Problem:
New Developments

Analgesic, anti-inflammatory, antipyretic…You might think that these characteristics alone make aspirin "the wonder drug." But this is still not the end of the story. Almost 100 years after Hoffmann and Eichengrün had succeeded in isolating and purifying aspirin in Germany, scientists and doctors around the world are still studying its beneficial properties. Recently, they have discovered a link between aspirin and heart and circulatory diseases. They have reported studies that show that taking a small dose (81 mg) of aspirin daily reduces the occurrence of heart attacks and strokes, two of the largest killers of people in the United States. So we've found yet another new use for the "wonder drug."

But what about its original use, relieving pain? For a long time no one really knew how aspirin made pain go away. It wasn't until 1971 that a British scientist named John Vane found an answer to that question. He was researching a family of compounds called prostaglandins, compounds that your body makes and uses for lots of different things. Among other things, your body uses these compounds to help transmit pain signals to your brain. Vane found that aspirin limits the ability of your body to make prostaglandins. This makes it hard for your body to send pain signals to your brain, lessening the pain you feel. Vane's work was important enough that he won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1982.

But there was more to be learned about aspirin. The body uses compounds called cyclooxygenases to make prostaglandins. Cyclooxygenases are inhibited by aspirin. In the early 1990s scientists learned that there are actually two kinds of cyclooxygenase: COX-1 and COX-2. COX-2 helps make the prostaglandins that help the body feel pain. Aspirin lessens the ability of COX-2 to function, and therefore makes you hurt less. But COX-1 helps make compounds that protect your stomach lining. Since aspirin inhibits this enzyme as well, COX-1 can't protect your stomach as well when aspirin is around. This is part of the reason aspirin upsets some people's stomachs.

This has led scientists to look for drugs that inhibit COX-2, but not COX-1. You can read about some of them in A Festival of Analgesics. Who knows what other discoveries the scientists of the future, maybe even you, will make in the next decade?

Next: Felix Hoffmann