V. Craig Jordan, the pharmacologist who discovered that the previously ineffective contraceptive tamoxifen could block the growth of breast cancer cells, helping pioneer an entirely new class of drugs that saved the lives of millions of women, died on June 9 at his home in Houston. He was 76 years old.
Balqees Abderrahman, a researcher who worked closely with Dr Jordan and served as his caregiver for several years, said the cause of death was kidney cancer.
Dr. Jordan was known as a meticulous and relentless researcher, qualities exemplified in his work on tamoxifen, a drug first synthesized in 1962 but discarded because it not only failed to prevent pregnancy but in some cases promoted it.
But Dr. Jordan, then still a PhD student at the University of Leeds in the UK, discovered something no one had noticed: estrogen had long been known to drive the development of breast cancer in postmenopausal women, and he wondered if tamoxifen might help stop it.
Cancer of all kinds had long been viewed as an invincible enemy that could only be treated with blunt and dangerous means like chemotherapy. But in the early 1970s, spurred by President Richard M. Nixon’s “War on Cancer” campaign, a new wave of research emerged that would lead to a revolution in oncology over the next three decades.
Dr. Jordan was at the forefront of that revolution. In decades of research, he was able to demonstrate that tamoxifen, when given to patients with early-stage breast cancer, could block estrogen receptors and halt tumor growth. In his words, it was an “anti-estrogen.”
Tamoxifen was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1977 to treat late-stage breast cancer, and then in 1999 to treat and prevent metastatic breast cancer, and was the first in a new class of drugs called selective estrogen receptor modulators. Today, tamoxifen and other drugs are prescribed to women around the world and are credited with helping millions of patients.
Tamoxifen isn’t perfect — it’s effective in 65-80 percent of postmenopausal women, but only 45-60 percent of premenopausal women — and Jordan found that it slightly increases the risk of a type of uterine cancer, but argued that its benefits for breast cancer patients are still overwhelming.
In 1998, Dr. Jordan worked with Stephen R. Cummings, an aging expert at the University of California, San Francisco, to show that raloxifene, another estrogen blocker, improved bone density in postmenopausal women and reduced their risk of developing breast cancer by as much as 70 percent.
Dr. Jordan was in many ways an old-fashioned researcher. He argued that drugs should be studied for all their potential uses, not just those that would make money or get them to market quickly. He also believed that scientists should be transparent about side effects, even if it made the drug less appealing. He called his research a “conversation with nature.”
Virgil Craig Jordan was born in New Braunfels, Texas on July 25, 1947. His English mother, Cynthia Mottram, and American father, Virgil Johnson, met while his father was serving in England during World War II, and returned to their home in Texas after the war.
His parents divorced shortly after Craig was born, and he and his mother moved to his mother’s family home in Bramhall, near Manchester, where he grew up. His mother later married Jeffrey Jordan, who adopted Craig.
By his own account, Craig was a mediocre student. The only subject he excelled in was chemistry, a passion he fostered by his mother building a lab in his bedroom.
“The experiments often got out of hand, with the smoky brew being hurled out the window onto the lawn below, sometimes setting the curtains on fire,” he wrote in the Endocrine Journal in 2014. “Not surprisingly, the lawn withered.”
Because of his poor grades, he expected to get a job straight out of high school, probably as a lab technician at a nearby factory run by Imperial Chemical Industries (now owned by the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca).
But his mother persuaded his teachers to let him continue his studies for an extra year, and thanks to this he managed to win a scholarship to the University of Leeds, where he obtained his BA in 1969, his PhD in 1973 and his PhD in 1985, all in pharmacology.
He also attended the University Officers Training Corps and then served in the British Army and Reserves until his retirement at the age of 55, most of his time with the elite Special Air Service, roughly equivalent to the US Navy SEALs.
While at the University of Leeds, he began researching tamoxifen and continued that interest while holding a series of positions at several institutions, including the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, the University of Wisconsin, Northwestern University, Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Georgetown University and, since 2014, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
Dr. 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 kidney cancer in 2018, which was a devastating outcome, but he nevertheless spoke publicly about it and has been fighting and overcoming it for the last few years of his life.
“I feel like I’m in a state of flux, but I’m not scared of dying.” “The results are encouraging,” he told oncology publication ASCO Post in 2022.“Because of the stupid things I did when I was younger, I was more likely than not to live past 30.”
