In the 1930s, Edward Kendall, working at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, isolated six hormones from adrenal glands. He named them for the order in which they were isolated: compounds A through F.
Dr. Philip Hench, a rheumatologist at the Mayo Clinic, noted that one of the hormones Kendall had isolated (compound E, which became known as cortisone), when administered to rheumatoid arthritis patients in clinical trials for other purposes, had an anti-inflammatory effect resulting in remarkable improvements to their arthritis pain. It was then found that many other diseases of an inflammatory nature were relieved by cortisone.
In 1950, Kendall and Hench (as well as Dr. Tadeus Reichstein of Germany who had also worked with isolating hormones in the adrenal cortex) were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology for their discovery. In his Nobel acceptance, Kendall spoke of the discovery of cortisone and of the vast discoveries still to be made. He quoted Shakespeare’s soothsayer, “In Nature’s infinite book of secrecy a little I can read.”
Kendall assigned administration of the patent for isolating cortisone to Research Corporation. The Kendall-Hench Fund was established by a $100,000 grant from Merck and Company and an allotment by Research Corporation of a portion of its income from patent rights in cortisone. The grants were designed to support research in endocrinology, but the research area proved too narrow and the program lapsed. Drugs with corticosteroids are still used today to treat inflammatory, allergic and rheumatic diseases.
Edward C. Kendall received Research Corporation grants in 1942, 1943 and 1944 for the study of cortical hormones.