‘Father of Tamoxifen’ researched revolutionary breast cancer drug
By Clay Risen
V. Craig Jordan, a pharmacologist whose discovery that a failed contraceptive, tamoxifen, could block the growth of breast cancer cells, opened up a whole new class of drugs and helped save the lives of millions of women, died on June 9 at his home in Houston, Texas. He was 76.
Balkees Abderrahman, a researcher who worked closely with Jordan and was his caregiver for several years, said the cause was renal cancer.
V Craig Jordan pioneered a life-saving breast cancer treatment.
Jordan was known as a meticulous, even obsessive researcher, a quality demonstrated in his work on tamoxifen. The drug was first synthesised in 1962, though it was discarded after not only failing to prevent conception but, in some cases, promoting it.
But Jordan, then still a doctoral student at the University of Leeds in Britain, saw something that no one else did. It had long been known that estrogen promoted breast cancer growth in postmenopausal women, and he suspected that tamoxifen could help stop it.
Cancer of all kinds had long been seen as an unconquerable foe, treatable only with blunt, dangerous tools like chemotherapy. But the early 1970s saw a new wave of research, fuelled in part by president Richard Nixon’s “war on cancer” campaign, which over the next 30 years would lead to a revolution in oncology.
Jordan was a leader in that revolution. Over decades of research, he was able to show that tamoxifen, when given to patients with early-stage breast cancer, interrupted the tumour’s growth by blocking its oestrogen receptors. It was, in his words, “anti-oestrogen.”
Approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use against late-stage breast cancer in 1977, and then for use against metastatic breast cancer and as a preventive measure in 1999, tamoxifen was the first in a new class of drugs called selective oestrogen receptor modulators. It and other drugs are now prescribed to women around the world and are credited with helping millions of patients.
Tamoxifen isn’t perfect. It works on 65 per cent to 80 per cent of postmenopausal patients and just 45 per cent to 60 per cent of premenopausal patients. And Jordan was the first to reveal that it led to a small increase in the risk of a kind of uterine cancer, although he argued that the benefits for breast cancer patients were still overwhelming.
In 1998, Jordan, working with Steven R. Cummings, an expert on ageing at the University of California, San Francisco, showed that another oestrogen-blocking drug, raloxifene, both improved bone density in postmenopausal women and reduced their risk of developing breast cancer by as much as 70 per cent.
Jordan was, in many ways, an old-school researcher. He insisted that a drug should be investigated for all its potential applications, not just the ones that might make money or be the quickest to market. He believed that scientists should be transparent about side effects, even if it meant reducing a drug’s appeal. He called his work “conversations with nature.”
V. Craig Jordan, the scientific director of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University, 2012.Credit: Getty
Virgil Craig Jordan was born on July 25, 1947, in New Braunfels, Texas. His British mother, Cynthia Mottram, and his American father, Virgil Johnson, met while his father was serving in England during World War II and then returned home to Texas after the war.
They divorced soon after Craig was born, and he and his mother moved to her home in Bramhall, near Manchester, where he grew up. She later married Geoffrey Jordan, who adopted Craig as his son.
By his own account, Jordan was a mediocre student. The only subject in which he excelled was chemistry, a passion that his mother fostered by letting him build a laboratory in his bedroom.
“Experiments would often get out of hand, so a fuming brew would be hurled out of the window onto the lawn below, leaving the curtains ablaze,” he wrote in Endocrine Journal in 2014. “Naturally, the lawn died.”
Given his poor grades, he assumed that he would go straight from high school to the workforce, perhaps as a lab technician at a nearby plant run by Imperial Chemical Industries (which today is part of the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca).
But his mother leaned on his teachers to give him another year of study to prepare for college, and he managed to win a scholarship to the University of Leeds. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1969, a doctorate in 1973 and a doctorate of science in 1985, all in pharmacology.
He also joined the University Officers’ Training Corps, after which he served in the British Army and its reserves until mandatory retirement at 55, most of the time with the elite Special Air Service, a rough equivalent to the US Navy SEALs.
V Craig JordanCredit: New York Times
While at Leeds, he began working on tamoxifen, an interest that he took with him through a series of positions at several institutions: the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts; the University of Wisconsin; Northwestern University outside Chicago; the Fox Chase Cancer Centre in Philadelphia; Georgetown University in Washington; and, starting in 2014, the MD Anderson Cancer Centre at the University of Texas in Houston.
Jordan’s three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Alexandra Noel and Helen Turner, and five grandchildren.
He was diagnosed with stage 4 renal cancer in 2018, an earth-shattering result that he nevertheless spoke openly about – and that he fought against and worked through for the last years of his life.
“I find myself in a state of flux, but I’m not scared of dying,” he told The ASCO Post, an oncology publication, in 2022. “I was the person most likely never to make age 30 with the stupid things I was doing in my youth.”
The New York Times