Ferid Murad

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Dr. Ferid Murad

Ferid Murad (born September 14, 1936) is an American physician and pharmacologist, and a co-winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He was born in Whiting, Indiana to John Murad (born Xhabir Murat Ejupi), an Albanian and Henrietta Bowman, an American. He received his MD and pharmacology Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University in 1965. He then joined the University of Virginia, where he was made professor in 1970, before moving to Stanford in 1981.

Murad's key work was in showing that nitroglycerin and related drugs worked by releasing nitric oxide into the body, with the gas somehow acting as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system, making blood vessels dilate. The missing steps in the signalling process were filled in by Robert F. Furchgott and Louis J. Ignarro, for which the three shared the 1998 Nobel Prize (and for which Murad and Furchgott received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1996). There was some criticism, however, of the Nobel committee's decision not to award the prize to Salvador Moncada, who had independently reached the same results as Ignarro.

One application of the mechanism for controlling blood vessels discovered by Murad et al. was in the development of the male erectile dysfunction drug Viagra.

Murad is now a faculty researcher at University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.