Janet Rideout

In 1995, after working at Burroughs Wellcome for over 26 years, and rising to the rank of associate division director, Rideout joined Inspire Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Merck in 2011) as Director of Chemistry. She subsequently had a number of promotions within the company: to Senior Director of Discovery in June 1996, Vice President in January 1998, and Senior Vice President of Discovery in February 2000.

In 1985, Rideout, along with four other BW scientists, applied for American and British patents for the use of AZT, given the chemical name zidovudine and the proprietary name Retrovir, for the treatment of HIV-1; they were approved in 1988, with Rideout is listed as the first co-inventor.

In June 1984, Burroughs Wellcome initiated a program to identify chemical compounds that might be effective against HIV, and they put Rideout in charge of choosing which compounds to test. There was limited knowledge about HIV at the time, but Rideout's search was aided by the finding that HIV was a retrovirus, a type of virus that transfers between cells with its genome encoded in RNA but, once it infects a host cell, reverse transcribes its RNA genome into a DNA copy which it then inserts into the host cell's DNA, so that the cell and all its progeny are perpetually infected. Knowing that HIV was a retrovirus, Rideout searched for compounds with antiretroviral activity; the company didn't have the necessary set-up for studying live HIV, so they screened against animal retroviruses, with the screening carried out by virologist Martha (Marty) St. Clair.

One of the compounds Rideout chose to test was AZT and by the end of 1984, Wellcome had shown that AZT was active against two animal retroviruses, Harvey sarcoma virus and Friend leukemia virus. To see if it was also active against HIV, they collaborated with scientists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), including Samuel Broder and Hiroaka Mitsuya, who had developed a method to grow the virus in immortalized human T4 cells (the type of immune cell HIV targets). NCI found AZT to be highly effective against HIV in these cells, and it went on to become the first FDA-approved treatment for HIV.

Shortly before graduation from the State University of New York, Buffalo, Rideout was hired by chemist and future Nobel laureate Gertrude Elion to work at a small US subsidiary of the British pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome Company (now GlaxoSmithKline). Initially located in Tuckahoe (village), New York, the branch moved to Research Triangle, North Carolina in 1970.

AZT was first synthesized in 1964 by a Michigan Cancer Foundation researcher, Jerome Horwitz, with hopes it could be used to treat leukemia, but it wasn't found to be effective and raised toxicity concerns so it was abandoned. There was limited research on it in the following years, including a report from a laboratory in showing it had activity against Friend virus, a murine virus that causes leukemia in mice, but retroviruses weren't thought to affect humans, and the paper drew little attention.

Janet Rideout was born Janet Litster January 6, 1939 in Bennington, Vermont. She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry from Mount Holyoke College. She then earned a PhD in organic chemistry from State University of New York, Buffalo in 1968.