People of ASP

Until his passing in 2005, Dr. Rinehart was a University Scholar, professor, and researcher in the School of Chemical Sciences at the Univ. Illinois. His career began as a chemist with an interest in natural products. Initially researching antibiotics from Actinomycetes, he investigated a new class of antibiotics, neomycins, from Streptomyces fradiae. He went on to invent a method known as mutasynthesis, later used by Pfizer. Later, he started studying natural products of marine organisms, and, most notably, he and his group discovered didemnins, a class of cyclic depsipeptides. Several of these compounds have been in clinical trials for anticancer activity. These compounds have also been found to reduce the function of the immune system and inhibit viruses of DNA and RNA. Also discovered by his group were the anticancer compounds known as ecteinascidins from the marine animal Ecteinascidia turbinata. One of the ecteinascidins, ET 743 (Yondelis®), was approved in the EU for use in the treatment of sarcoma in late 2007, and has been granted orphan drug status by the European Commission for treatment of soft tissue sarcoma and ovarian cancer. His achievements culminated in many awards. In 1988, he was awarded an Anniversary Medal from the Kitasato Institute in Tokyo, and he later earned the Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products from the ACS in 1997. In 1998, the Univ. of Missouri awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Science degree. He graduated 139 grad students, 67 undergraduates, and 124 postdocs. His career resulted in 390 publications, 35 patents, and seven books. (Based on the obituary by Amy Keller in the Summer 2007 ASP Newsletter.)