Arpad Furka

Árpád Furka (Criscior, Romania, December 3, 1931) is a Hungarian organic chemist. He is known as the inventor of combinatorial technology 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

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

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. 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. 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. 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. His main field of research is the extensive applied combinatorial technology invented in 1982. This is based on the so-called split-pool synthesis. 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, 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 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

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

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 and
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)
Com ponents 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