His death was announced by the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where Dr. Jordan was a professor. He suffered from kidney cancer, his daughter Alexandra Noel said.
Dr Jordan, who grew up in England and held dual British and American citizenship, once told a reporter that he had “barely made it out of primary school” because of his poor grades.
These early reports, however, do not reflect the curiosity, perseverance and talent that would eventually make him one of the most important cancer researchers of the second half of the 20th century, known as the “father of tamoxifen.”
When Dr Jordan began his research in the late 1960s, as a PhD student at the University of Leeds in England, cancers considered treatable were attacked in three main ways: with surgery to remove tumours and with radiation and chemotherapy to kill cancer cells.
Breast cancer patients have historically been subjected to radical, often disfiguring, operations to remove the breast and surrounding tissue.
Radiotherapy opened up new therapeutic avenues, but it was accompanied by serious side effects. Chemotherapy, the latest advance in cancer care, represented a revolution in medical science, but it was often brutal for the patient.
“There was an obsession around the idea that combination chemotherapy was going to cure all cancers,” Dr. Jordan told the website Oncology Central in 2019.
“We felt like we were swimming against the tide,” he added, as he and his colleagues tried to push scientists to look beyond chemotherapy regimens, which launch relatively indiscriminate attacks on the body, and consider the possibilities of drugs that target specific cancer cells.
Dr. Jordan demonstrated the potential of his idea in an unexpected way, on the anti-estrogen drug tamoxifen which began its pharmaceutical life as an experimental contraceptive.
As a contraceptive, tamoxifen worked very well in rats. In women, it was a resounding failure and “it was almost certain,” according to Dr. Jordan, that the woman who took it would conceive a child.”
“During the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the last thing we needed was for everyone to get pregnant,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1998.
But Dr. Jordan saw another use for tamoxifen and began further study. For years, it had been known that patients with certain forms of breast cancer—those with estrogen receptors—responded favorably to having their ovaries, which produce estrogen, removed.
Dr. Jordan speculated that an anti-estrogen drug might have a similar positive effect. In 1973, he demonstrated that tamoxifen could prevent breast cancer in rats.
The following year, human testing began in the United States. In 1977, the Food and Drug Administration approved tamoxifen for use in advanced cases of breast cancer.
The following decade, it was approved for the treatment of early-stage cancer in combination with surgery. And in 1998, the FDA approved the use of tamoxifen in high-risk but otherwise healthy patients to prevent the disease from developing.
After Dr. Jordan’s death, the Prevent Cancer Foundation credited him with discovering “the first FDA-approved drug to prevent cancer.”
Tamoxifen carries risks, including in some cases the development of uterine cancer or blood clots. But it remains one of the most prescribed drugs in the treatment of cancer and is on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines.
Tamoxifen is a selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM). Other SERMs include raloxifene, another of Dr. Jordan’s research interests, which is used for the prevention of osteoporosis as well as breast cancer.
Dr. Jordan was born Virgil Craig Johnson in New Braunfels, Texas, on July 25, 1947. His mother, who was British, and his biological father, who was from Dallas, met while his father was serving in the U.S. Army in England during World War II.
The couple had moved to Texas after the war but divorced when Craig, as Dr. Jordan was always known, was still a toddler. He and his mother moved to England, where he grew up in Bramhall, near Manchester. He was raised by his mother and stepfather, who adopted him and gave him the surname Jordan.
Despite his poor academic performance, Dr. Jordan developed a love of chemistry early on.
“I turned my room into a chemistry lab, but it was a real chemistry lab, not one of those kids’ kits, with stuff I got from the drugstore and had liberated from school,” he recalled years later.
“There were several situations where my life was in danger, when my experiments exploded or caught fire, and I had to throw things out the window,” he continued. “But my mother always said, ‘At least we know where he is.’”
He eventually enrolled at the University of Leeds, where he received a BSc in 1969 and a PhD in 1973, both in pharmacology, and wrote his doctoral thesis on tamoxifen. The university awarded him a Doctor of Science degree in 1985.
At the University of Leeds, Dr Jordan joined the British Army Officer Training Corps. He then served in the Intelligence Corps and the Special Air Service and remained for years in the Reserves.
During his scientific career, he worked at institutions including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, and the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University Hospital before joining MD Anderson Cancer Center in 2014.
Dr. Jordan’s marriages to Marion Williams, Monica Morrow and Julia Jauch ended in divorce. He is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Alexandra Noel of Stillwater, Minnesota, and Helen Turner of Salt Lake City, and five grandchildren.
Known as the “father” of a life-saving breast cancer drug, Dr. Jordan regularly encountered people, he told the Houston Chronicle, who would tell him, “My mother takes tamoxifen, my wife takes tamoxifen.”
“Mothers have seen their children grow up,” he said. “Grandmothers have seen their grandchildren grow up.”
