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75th stories: Rational drug design - Gertrude Elion and George Hitchings

When Sir Henry Wellcome died in 1936, he left two legacies: his pharmaceutical company, the Wellcome Foundation, and his charity, the Wellcome Trust, which was the sole shareholder of the company. A decade later, however, and these legacies were in jeopardy. During World War II, the UK company had focused on supporting the war effort, and had suffered a punishing war tax regime. It was nearly bankrupt.

The company's fortunes had a direct impact on the Trust, which relied on a dividend from the company to fulfil its charitable objectives of supporting research to improve human health. In its first 20 years, the Trust's total charitable expenditure was only £1.17 million.

That the company survived at all was due to the US side of the operations. Run as an independent subsidiary, the Burroughs Wellcome company remained profitable during and after the War and could prop up its UK parent. And it was the US side that drove the growth of the company over the next few decades. A whole new generation of drugs emerged from a programme developed by two chemists, George Hitchings and Gertrude Elion, who worked steadily from the 1940s through to the 1980s, and earned Nobel honours in 1988 for their discoveries. Along the way, they produced a stunning array of landmark therapies. They included products effective against agents that medicine had previously been helpless to combat: viruses. In the 1980s and 1990s, two of those antivirals took the company into the billion-dollar league.

So valuable did the company become that when the Wellcome Trust floated the shares on the stock market in 1986 and sold them over the next 15 years, diversifying its assets, it became the world's largest medical research charity at the time.

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