President John F. Kennedy would have had another heir had his
second son not died from respiratory distress syndrome (RDS). The
disease—caused by developmental insufficiency of surfactant
production and structural immaturity in the lungs—doomed many
premature babies before the development of Infasurf.
That drug was developed by UB researchers Edmund A. Egan, MD,
and Bruce A. Holm, PhD. Since 1999, nearly 500,000 premature
infants have been rescued with Infasurf, an exogenous surfactant
that decreases the incidence of RDS and associated mortality.
Egan, professor of pediatrics, physiology and biophysics, is
president and chief executive officer of ONY, the drug’s
manufacturer, located in UB’s Technology Incubator. Holm, who
died in 2011, was UB senior vice provost and executive director of
UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics
and Life Sciences as well as a professor of pediatrics,
gynecology-obstetrics and pharmacology.
An adult form of the drug, Pneumasurf, is currently in phase
three clinical trials. Pneumasurf is targeted at patients requiring
mechanical ventilators as a result of direct acute respiratory
distress syndrome, which affects some 100,000 previously healthy
Americans annually and has a 35 percent mortality rate.
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