
Kenneth L. Rinehart
President (1995-1996), Farnsworth Award (1989)
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.)