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