Jerome P. Horwitz, a scientific researcher who created AZT in 1964 in the hope that it would cure cancer but who entered the medical pantheon decades later when AZT became the first successful drug treatment for people with AIDS, died on Sept. 6. He was 93. Dr. Horwitz never achieved much fame and did not earn a penny for making the AZT compound. The riches - billions of dollars eventually - went to the drug company that tested it, patented it and, in 1986, won federal approval for it as the first treatment proven to prolong AIDS patients' lives. Dr. Horwitz told interviewers that when AZT (short for azidothymidine) had failed as a cancer drug, he literally put it away on a shelf in disappointment and moved on to explore other ideas, never bothering to patent it. To console himself, he half-kiddingly told colleagues at Wayne State University's cancer research center in Detroit that AZT and several similar drugs he had developed were "a very interesting set of compounds that were waiting for the right disease." Dr. Horwitz became a cancer researcher in the mid-1950s at the Michigan Cancer Foundation and a professor at the Wayne State University Medical School. (The Cancer Foundation was renamed the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in 1995.) He remained with those institutions until retiring in 2005. One of his last projects involved developing drugs for treating solid tumors. The research led Wayne State to obtain a patent, which it licensed in 2003 to a pharmaceutical company.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/health/jerome-p-horwitz-creator-of-azt-dies-at-93.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/researcher-jerome-p-horwitz-93-created-azt-the-first-approved-treatment-for-hivaids/2012/09/19/0c08c38a-0280-11e2-9b24-ff730c7f6312_story.html