Robert Sandler
A two-year-old with acute leukaemia treated by Sidney Farber with the folate antagonist aminopterin from December 1947. His temporary remission, reported in 1948, was the first evidence that a drug could turn back leukaemia.
Robert Sandler was two years old and gravely ill with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia at Children's Hospital Boston when, in December 1947, Sidney Farber began treating him with aminopterin, a folic acid antagonist newly synthesised by Yellapragada Subbarow's team at Lederle. Within weeks his blood counts improved and he was well enough to go home. He was one of sixteen children in Farber's June 1948 report in the New England Journal of Medicine, in which ten showed remissions; the effect lasted months, and Robert relapsed and died in 1948. It was the first demonstration that a chemical could induce remission in a childhood cancer, the starting point for methotrexate and for combination chemotherapy. His name is recorded in the histories of the period, including Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies.