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Arpad Furka

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Arpad Furka
Arpad Furka in 2023
Born
Furka Árpád

(1931-12-03) December 3, 1931 (age 93)
Crișcior, Romania
EducationUniversity of Szeged
OccupationUniversity Professor
Years active1955-2001
Known forInventor of combinatorial chemistry
SpouseSzaniszló Erzsébet
Parents
Awards2002 Széchenyi Prize
Websiteszerves.chem.elte.hu/furka/

Árpád Furka (Crișcior, Romania, December 3, 1931) is a Hungarian organic chemist. He is known as the inventor of combinatorial technology[1][2] a process that has two components: synthesis in a single process large numbers (even billions) of organic compounds as mixtures and identification also in a single process the bioactive components of the mixture for using them as drug candidates.

Early years and education

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Árpád Furka began his elementary school studies in a Romanian-language school and finished it in Hungarian one after the family returned to Hungary. Due to the financial situation of the family, he could not go to high school, but in 1950 he was able to enroll in a one-year residential course that prepared him for university studies where he graduated in 1951. He completed his university studies at the University of Szeged, where in 1955 he first became a secondary school teacher majoring in chemistry and physics and gained PhD in 1959.

Research and career

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His first job was at the Attila József High School in Makó, where he taught physics in the 1955/56 school year. Then returned to the Department of Chemical Technology of the University of Szeged where he worked on the determination of the mechanism of Fries rearrangement.[3][4][5] In 1961, he became a member of the peptide chemistry group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at Eötvös Loránd University Budapest. In 1964, he was awarded a post-doctoral scholarship by the Canadian National Research Council and, as a result, conducted research at the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Alberta in 1964/65 where he played a major role in the determination of the amino acid sequence of chymotrypsinegen-B.[6] In 1972 he became a full professor in the Department of Organic Chemistry at Eötvös Loránd University from where he retired in 2001. In the 70s of the last century, in cooperation with the Hungarian drug company CHINOIN, his group isolated a bioactive ingredient from the bovine parathyroid powder that proved to be gamma-glutamyl-taurine and was named Litoralon.[7][8] In parallel with the above work, he developed a calculation method that made it possible to transform the gaseous state heat of formation of organic compounds into data directly showing their structure-dependent energy.[9] His main field of research is the extensive applied combinatorial technology invented in 1982. This is based on the so-called split-pool synthesis.[10] The essence of this technology is that one of the two reactants in a multi-step synthesis is replaced by a mixture. The result is an exponential increase of the number of formed compounds. In this way, millions or even billions of compounds are created in the form of a mixture that can be used as a cornucopia of new compounds in drug research. An interesting feature of the method is that if the synthesis is carried out using the solid-phase process developed by Professor Merrifield,[11] only one compound is formed on each particle of the solid support. Although it is possible to know exactly which compounds are formed during the synthesis, the structure of the individual components can only be known if they are determined or if the building blocks used during the synthesis are encoded in some way. Of the various labeling methods tested, coding with DNA oligomers invented by S. Brenner and R A Lerner[12] proved to be the most successful since the SBS method made it possible to determine all the encoding sequences of the bioactive components in a single process. In 1994, Furka was invited by the AdvancedChemTech company based in Louisville, Kentucky, USA, where he spent 5 years as a scientific consultant and developed new variants of the synthesis and screening.

Awards

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  • 1964 Fellowship of the National Research Council of Canada
  • 1996 Leonardo da Vinci Excellence Award of the Moet Henessy-Louis Vuitton Foundation
  • 1999 MTA Academic Award
  • 2001 Honorary President, European Society of Combinatorial Sciences
  • 2002 Széchenyi Prize

Selected publicatios

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  • Study on Fries reaction. Part I. Isomerisation of thymyl acetate
  • Study on the Fries reaction. Part II. Effect of hydrogen chloride on the isomerisation of thymyl acetate
  • Structure of chymotrypsinogen B compared with chymotrypsinogen A and trypsinogen
  • New method for isolation of the C-terminal fragment of peptides
  • Isolation of gamma-L-glutamyl-taurine from the protein free extract of bovine parathyroid powder
  • Synthesis of gamma-L-glutamyl-taurine
  • Comparison of the heats of formation of hydrocarbons
  • General method for rapid synthesis of multicomponent peptide mixtures
  • New Thermochemical Reference System Expressing the Relative Energy of Organic Compounds
  • History of combinatorial chemistry
  • The string synthesis. A spatially addressable split procedure
  • Redistribution in Combinatorial Synthesis. A Theoretical Approach
  • Combinatorial chemistry: 20 years on
  • Relative energy of organic compounds I. Hydrocarbons and their oxygen
  • Relative energy of organic compounds II. Halides, nitrogen and sulfur compounds (2009, szerző)
  • Components of the heat of reactions
  • Relative energy of organic compounds IV. Radicals, carbocations, and carbanions
  • Facts from the Early Years of the History of Combinatorial Chemistry
  • Forty years of combinatorial technology

References

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  1. ^ Árpád Furka Forty years of combinatorial technology Drug Discovery Today 27 (10), 1-12 (2022).
  2. ^ Á. Furka, Combinatorial chemistry: 20 years on, Drug Discovery Today 7 (2002) 1–12.
  3. ^ Á. Furka, T. Széll. Study on Fries reaction. Part I. Isomerisation of thymyl acetate. J. Chem. Soc. 1960, 2312.
  4. ^ T. Széll, Á. Furka. Study on the Fries reaction. Part II. Effect of hydrogen chloride on the isomerisation of thymyl acetate. J. Chem. Soc. 1960, 2321.
  5. ^ SZTE Doktori Repozitórium Furka Árpád A timilacetát Fries-reakciójának kinetikai vizsgálata
  6. ^ L. B. Smillie, A. Furka, N. Nagabhushan, K. J. Stevenson, C. O. Parkes. Structure of chymotrypsinogen B compared with chymotrypsinogen A and trypsinogen. Nature, 218, 343 (1968).
  7. ^ Á. Furka, F. Sebestyén, L. Feuer, A.. Horvath, J. Hercsel, S. Ormai, B. Bányai. Isolation of gamma-L-glutamyl-taurine from the protein free extract of bovine parathyroid powder. Acta Biochim. Biophis. Acad. Sci. Hung., 15, 39-47 (1980).
  8. ^ F. Sebestyén, Á. Furka, L. Feuer, J. Gulyás, Gy. Szokán. Synthesis of gamma-L-glutamyl-taurine. Int. J. Peptide Protein Res., 16, 245-247 (1980).
  9. ^ Á. Furka and I. Czimer New Thermochemical Reference System Expressing the Relative Energy of Organic Compounds. Structural Chemistry 4, 327–331 (1993).
  10. ^ Á. Furka, F. Sebestyén, M. Asgedom, G. Dibó. General method for rapid synthesis of multicomponent peptide mixtures. Int. J. Peptide Protein Res., 37, 487-493 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1399-3011.1991.tb00765.x
  11. ^ R.B. Merrifield, Solid Phase Peptide Synthesis. I. The Synthesis of a Tetrapeptide, J Am Chem Soc 85 (1963) 2149.
  12. ^ S. Brenner, R.A. Lerner Encoded combinatorial chemistry PNAS, 89 (1992), pp. 5381-5383.
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