Sam Broder, a close friend and skilled immunologist, decided to mount an effort to discover drugs that kill or arrest the spread of the virus. He recruited Myers as the lead pharmacologist. Of these two, only AZT eventually proved of sufficient value to warrant FDA approval as treatment for HIV infection. During the HIV clinical trials, Dr. Myers became well acquainted with suramin and its interesting properties as an anticancer agent. This interest focused on a process called cell cycle regulation.
All cells are able to grow or remain stagnant, depending on the needs of the body.
For example, if you remove half of someone's liver, the remaining liver tissue will rapidly grow until the liver reaches the correct size and then stop. Thus, a key characteristic of normal tissues is strict control of cell growth. In the early 1980s, it became apparent that growth of normal tissues was controlled by the production of small proteins called growth factors. Some cancers occur because a growth factor is produced erratically. Suramin was shown to block PDGF and cause simian sarcoma virus infected cells to return to normal behavior.