At 88, this doctor won’t give up on a long-ignored treatment for strokes and heart attacks
He’s a professor at Harvard Medical School, but in many ways, Dr. Victor Gurewich is an outsider.
His research is funded by a small family foundation, and he hasn’t tried for a federal grant in decades. He’s a primary care doctor whose work tramples on the terrain of cardiologists and neurologists.
So it’s perhaps not surprising that, more than 20 years after figuring out a combination therapy that he believes is a safer, more effective way to treat heart attacks and strokes, he’s had little success getting anyone to listen.
Now at age 88, Gurewich is still trying to convince his medical peers that he’s right, and a tiny company he started in 2006 is about to launch a clinical trial in Europe that he hopes will prove it.
“I’m stubborn. I don’t give up,” he said during an interview in the modest Cambridge, Mass., offices of Thrombolytic Science International, where the built-in bookshelves are lined with his lab notebooks, meticulously hand-labeled and dating back to 1963.
His long struggle to be heard offers insight into how promising research ideas sometimes fail to take hold — even in the face of favorable evidence — said Gregory del Zoppo, a University of Washington expert on stroke treatment who
