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Professor Antonín Holý, the discoverer of new antiviral drugs, has died

After a long illness, Professor Antonín Holý, one of the most important Czech scientists of the 20th century, died on Monday, 16 July 2012. He would have celebrated his 76th birthday on 1 September this year. Antonín Holý, whose professional career was connected particularly with the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry (IOCB) of the Academy of Sciences of the CR, discovered new antiviral drugs, which help cure millions of people all over the world. These substances are the basis for the production of the most effective medicines for AIDS available so far as well as medicines for smallpox, herpes zoster, viral infections of the eye membrane or hepatitis B.

 
Despite all of the international fame of the excellent chemist, Prof. Holý remained a modest individual, who throughout his life placed an emphasis particularly on conscientious scientific work. He felt himself to be mainly a scientific employee, namely even when he was the Director of the IOCB of the ASCR. ‘Personally, I would not have advanced in my work all the way to where I am today in another organization than the Academy of Sciences’ he announced several years ago.
 
Antonín Holý joined the IOCB, ASCR, in 1960 with an honor’s degree in Chemistry from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University. After three years, the starting scientist transferred to a new laboratory of the chemistry of nucleic acids. He then led this section for twenty years. We can label the meeting of Prof. Holý with the young Belgian virologist Erik de Clerq from Leuven University in 1976 as crucial, when the exceptionally productive cooperation of the laboratories of the IOCB, ASCR, and the Rega Institute in Belgium on a new group of potential antiviral drugs began to develop. The researchers focused their attention on a group of so-called acyclic phophonate nucleosides which proved to be promising. In cooperation with the American pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences (Vistide, Hepsera, Viread, Truvada, Atripla), they managed to successfully transfer several substances into medicinal form.
 
Prof. Holý then not only managed to prepare effective substances but knew how to acquire partners for their biological testing and then also commercial partners for the preparation of the medicines. That is how ‘his’ substances became the basis for modern therapies of many serious illnesses.
The passing of Prof. Holý is an enormous loss not only for the Academy of Sciences of the CR but also for all of Czech and without exaggeration also global science.
 
Photo: Stanislava Kyselová (Akademický bulletin) and Dorothea Bylica
Prepared by: Department of Media Communication of the Head Office of the ASCR and the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the ASCR

 

16 Jul 2012