Renowned HIV scientist Holy dies at 75
Antonin Holy, the prominent Czech chemist whose research helped revolutionise the development of antiviral drugs used in the treatment of HIV and hepatitis B, died on 16 July. He was 75. The Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Czech Academy of Sciences, where Dr Holy began working in 1960, said he died after battling an unspecified long-term disease. The Czech scientist, whose work focused on nucleic acid chemistry, was instrumental in discovering substances that form drugs used to treat patients with AIDS, HIV, hepatitis B, smallpox virus and eye inflammation. Dr Holy passed away on the day that health regulators in the United States gave a green light for Truvada, a drug that he helped develop, to be used in the treatment of patients who are at a higher risk of contracting the virus that causes AIDS. The drug, which includes the drug Viread that is used to treat retinitis in AIDS patients, is used to prevent infection. Dr Holy and virologist Erik De Clercq, a leading researcher at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, developed Viread. They began working together in 1976. Gilead Sciences Inc., a United States-based pharmaceutical company and the maker of Truvada, donated millions of dollars to the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, and a portion of that donation helped fund Dr Holy's work. 'It is a huge loss,' said Zdenek Havlas, a former director of the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Czech Academy of Sciences, and a colleague of Dr Holy's. 'He belonged and he always will belong among the greatest chemists and scientists. He had a special talent for looking at a chemical structure to tell immediately whether it was worth continuing to explore and whether it would have any effects.' Dr Holy was born in Prague on 1 September 1936. For the most part, he worked alone and was banned from supervising students under the communist regime in the former Czechoslovakia. Dr Holy was given permission to build a team after the collapse of the communist regime in 1989, and he became a lecturer at Czech universities. The School of Chemistry at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom granted him an honorary professorship in 2008. Dr Holy received the European Union's Descartes Prize for Science and the Medal of Merit of the Czech Republic in 2001. His name was put forward by the Czech Academy of Sciences in 2008 to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine.For more information, please visit:Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry:http://www.uochb.cz/web/structure/31.html
Countries
Belgium, Czechia