With 256 inventions and over 900 patents and patent applications Ivars Calvin is one of the most productive scientists in medical biochemistry. This has the Latvians now introduced a nomination for the European Inventor Award in the lifetime achievement category. Above all, the heart medicine Meldonium, marketed under the name Mildronate, has led the Inventor Award jury on its decision. "More than two million people are currently being treated with it," says Calvin.
The enormous productivity of the scientist seems to even more remarkable. While Calvin was able to go in 1979 as a postdoctoral fellow at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, but ultimately the price for the privilege was too high. His wife and two young daughters were not allowed to join him in Munich. The talented young scientists returned to the Soviet Union, where he tried Mildronate not to let that stop you from scarce resources , who developed drug molecules for Organic Synthesis since the 1970s at the Latvian Institute recalls. So it went on until after careful consideration of the production of organic compounds in the laboratory, and then rushed to check these for their practicality in experimental animals.
Expensive screenings bypasses the researchers
Normally, it is common in the pharmaceutical industry to test thousands and thousands of substances in high throughput screening, and then the best candidates to optimize step by step. This process, which takes a lot of time and money, Calvin bypasses still.
"Others think I'm crazy. But I've always worked - not only with his hands, but also with the brain, "he says with a wink. "I start my projects well thought out. And I believe that God helps me also to end it. "
This was also his credo in developing Mildronate. The drug comes about in the coronary heart disease is used or after a heart attack. These extremely frequent cardiovascular-suffering the heart muscle due to atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) is no longer a sufficient blood supply. The tissue is increasingly damaged by toxic degradation products.
Mildronate directs the metabolism of stressed muscle cells from new. Through the active formation of the amino acid carnitine is inhibited, thus inhibited the oxidation of fatty acids. Thereby the cells remains more oxygen, also less degradation products accumulate. Such relieved, the heart can handle the lack supply better and fueling glucose as an energy supplier. Go here to our official site http://www.mildronate.me/