HIV treatment creator Jerome Horwitz

When medical researcher Jerome P. Horwitz first synthesized the chemical compound AZT in the 1960s, he hoped it would be a successful treatment for cancer. At first, he thought he had failed.

And in the short term, he had. AZT was not a cure for cancer. But two decades later, it emerged as a treatment for a disease that had not yet been named when Horwitz was toiling in his Detroit laboratory. The disease was HIV/AIDS. In 1987, AZT became the first treatment for the virus approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

AZT was not a cure, and it had downsides, including sky-high costs and dangerous side effects. But it was the first treatment that significantly decreased HIV-related mortality rates -- at a time when many scientists considered HIV an untreatable disease. It later became part of a drug combination that curbed deaths even further.

Even as those "cocktails" were supplanted by other more effective regimens, scientists say, AZT has continued to serve as a model for treatment of the disease.

"AZT stood up and said, 'Stop your pessimism,' " said Samuel Broder, a National Cancer Institute scientist who headed a group of scientists that helped discover the therapeutic nature of AZT in the 1980s. " 'Stop your sense of futility. Go back to the lab. Go back to development. Go back to clinical trials. Things will work.' "

Horwitz died Sept. 6 at 93 at a hospital in West Bloomfield Township, Mich. His death, from pneumonia and a heart attack, was confirmed by his wife, Sharon Newman Horwitz. He had worked for nearly five decades at Wayne State University in Detroit and the affiliated institution now known as the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute.

Jerome Phillip Horwitz was born Jan. 16, 1919, in Detroit. Horwitz decided to pursue science after reading Paul de Kruif's book "Microbe Hunters" as a teenager.

He received a bachelor's degree in 1942 and a master's degree in 1944, both in chemistry and from the University of Detroit Mercy, and a doctorate in organic chemistry from the University of Michigan in 1948. In 1956, he joined Wayne State University.

Survivors include his wife, Sharon, of Farmington Hills, Mich.; two daughters, Carol Kastan and Suzy Gross, both of West Bloomfield Township; and five grandchildren.