Professor David B Sachar, a former icddr,b scientist, has been awarded with the Golden Goose Award 2019. Sachar was recognised for his over fifty years old research - ‘The Frog Skin That Saved 50 Million Lives’ conducted in Dhaka (then Dacca, East Pakistan) that led to the development of oral rehydration therapy by physicians David Nalin and Richard A Cash.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science recently conferred the award to Sachar at the Library of Congress, Washington, USA, said icddr,B on Monday. The annual award celebrates ground-breaking, federally funded basic research that has had a significant impact on human life, scientific advances, and societal needs.
In the 1960s, as a young Harvard-trained doctor and researcher of intestine mechanisms David Sachar joined Cholera Research Laboratory in the then East Pakistan (now icddr,b, also known as International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh), which was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the US Centers for Disease Control.
In 1966, Professor Sachar started measuring electric potentials across frog skins while he was in Professor Hans Ussing’s laboratory in Copenhagen, which led him to develop an ingenious but simple method for measuring electric potential in the intact human intestine. He used it to test the function of patients’ intestinal sodium transport during the course of cholera. By assessing intestinal potential at the height of their diarrhea and again in convalescence, Professor Sachar demonstrated not only that active sodium absorption was intact throughout the disease, but that it was also robustly stimulated by the infusion of glucose into the intestinal lumen.
The finding, published in Gastroenterology in 1969, gave confidence for Norbert Hirschhorn another icddr,b scientists and his colleague at the time, to conduct a landmark clinical studies showing that the infusion of glucose and balanced electrolytes into the intestinal tract of cholera patients dramatically reduced and, in some cases, altogether eliminated the need for intravenous fluids.
Within two years of Professor Sachar’s findings and Hirschhorn’s clinical studies, the administration of a simple solution (sugar and electrolytes) by David Nalin and Richard Cash was perfected; it has gone on to save tens of millions of lives around the world. The World Health Organisation estimates that by drastically lowering the costs and skill needed to administer treatment, ORT has saved over 50 million lives in the past five decades.
