Pfizer chemist known for Zoloft
Ken Koe, a Pfizer Inc. chemist who co-invented Zoloft, which once was the most-prescribed the antidepressant drug in the U.S., has died. He was 90.
He died on Oct. 7 in Shrewsbury, Mass., at the home of his daughter, Kristin M. Koe, according to the website of Heald & Chiampa Funeral Home. No cause was given.
Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1991, Zoloft sales peaked at about US$3.36 billion for Pfizer in 2004, two years before its patent ran out.
Zoloft is Pfizer’s brand name for the chemical sertraline hydrochloride. It is one of a class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and is used to treat depression and anxiety.
Koe and a fellow Pfizer chemist Willard Welch began developing Zoloft in the 1970s. Billie Kenneth Koe was born April 15, 1925, in Astoria, Ore., to Benjamin and Monta Jean Koe, both Chinese immigrants. His father was an itinerant labourer in salmon canneries. Later, the family lived in the back of their laundry in the Chinatown section of Portland, Ore.
Koe earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Reed College in Portland in 1945, where he attended classes on scholarship while supporting himself washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant, according to a Reed alumni profile. He earned a Master of Science in chemistry at the University of Washington in 1948 and his PhD at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., in 1952.
In 1955, Koe took a position with Pfizer Research Laboratories in New York. He worked on several classes of drugs, including new antibiotics and a semi-synthetic version of penicillin, according to a Pfizer profile. He spent 40 years with Pfizer, retiring in 1995 as research adviser in Pfizer’s neuroscience department in Groton, Conn.
Koe’s wife, the former Jo Ann Lew, died in 1995.
In addition to his daughter, his survivors include a second daughter, Karen E. Koe, and five grandchildren, according to the funeral home.