While exercising in a weight room on campus, Kopchick heard about an Ohio University alumnus who was president of a company involved in drug development. He called Richard Hawkins, a 1972 graduate, and told him about his growth hormone antagonist discovery. Several months later, Hawkins signed Kopchick and the university to an eight-year research contract with his company, Sensus Drug Development Corporation, to develop growth hormone antagonists. The company targeted its first drug trials on acromegaly because of the disease's obvious connection to high levels of growth hormone. The disease, seen mostly in middle-aged adults, is caused by a brain tumor on the pituitary gland that prompts an overproduction of growth hormone.
Current treatments are invasive, often ineffective, and can have serious side effects.
During the past several years, clinical trials involving daily injections of the new drug, called pegvisomant, have been conducted on more than 150 acromegalic patients at 16 medical centers in the United States and Europe. I think it's going to make a major difference in their lives. We're offering them a degree of control that we couldn't offer them before. Patients' conditions improved considerably, with soft tissues beginning to shrink and fluid retention subsiding, Melmed says. The drug contains the amino acid change that makes the molecule a growth hormone antagonist.