David Horrobin

David Frederick Horrobin (6 October 1939 – 1 April 2003) was a British-Canadian entrepreneur, medical researcher, author and editor.

He is best known as the founder of the biotechnology company Scotia Holdings and as a promoter of evening primrose oil as a medical treatment, Horrobin was founder and editor of the journals Medical Hypotheses and Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids, the latter journal (initially titled Prostaglandins and Medicine) co-founded with his then graduate student Morris Karmazyn.

Horrobin believed that many diseases involve a lack of fatty acid precursors and might be alleviated by supplementing with the appropriate fatty acid.

Horrobin's efforts focused on evening primrose oil, which contains gamma-linolenic acid.

On completing his pre-clinical work, Horrobin became a fellow of Magdalen College in 1963.

At Magdalen, he was strongly influenced by the nutritionist Hugh MacDonald Sinclair and his hypotheses on essential fatty acids and degenerative disease.

Following participation in the Flying Doctor Service in east Africa, Horrobin was appointed as professor and chairman of medical physiology at Nairobi University in Kenya.

In 1972, he moved to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where he was appointed as a reader in medical physiology.

In 1975, he became professor of medicine at the University of Montreal.

While working as an academic investigator, in Africa and later, Horrobin developed a theory implicating altered fatty acid metabolism in schizophrenia.

The idea did not generate interest, and Horrobin failed to obtain funding.

It was noted that Horrobin presented only circumstantial evidence and was unable to propose a mechanism underlying the hypothesised link.

To raise money for his research, Horrobin left academia and in 1977 established a company called Efamol to sell evening primrose oil (EPO) as a proposed treatment for various ailments.

For example, Horrobin considered EPO to be a treatment for eczema "after trying it on the son of a librarian from his college".

Horrobin planned to use the profits from Efamol to fund research and development of drugs containing EPO fatty acids.

In the 1980s, Horrobin sold primrose oil in the United States without legally demonstrating its safety and efficacy, leading to government confiscations and felony indictments of his associates.

Horrobin was later accused of withholding research data and suppressing the reports of scientists who questioned his claims.

During Horrobin's tenure as chief executive, Scotia Pharmaceuticals obtained licences for several drugs based on evening primrose oil, but these licenses were withdrawn for lack of efficacy.

Efamol, renamed Scotia Pharmaceuticals in 1987, was active in Nova Scotia, Surrey and Scotland.

In 1993, under Horrobin's leadership, Scotia was one of the first biotechnology companies to be floated on the London Stock Exchange.

Scotia spent heavily on research, being ranked 79th among all UK companies in 1993, and reached a peak market capitalisation of about £600m in 1996.

As a major shareholder of Scotia, Horrobin rose to number 212 in 1996 on the list of the wealthiest people in the United Kingdom.

Horrobin, within several years of founding Efamol, was selling EPO in more than 25 countries.

He marketed the supplement as a treatment for "PMS, alcoholism, pregnancy-induced hypertension, atopic eczema, elevated cholesterol levels, hypertension, scleroderma, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, mastalgia (breast pain) and other problems", but according to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Horrobin did not satisfactorily demonstrate the efficacy and safety of his supplement.

The FDA advised Efamol not to ship EPO to the United States without obtaining approval.

Horrobin agreed, but began making shipments.

Horrobin conspired with General Nutrition, Inc. to process Efamol into capsules in California; it would then be sold to General Nutrition and relabeled for resale under a different brand name.

According to an FDA investigation, Horrobin suggested marketing strategies to circumvent the laws, including coaching retail representatives on making oral claims to customers, "planting articles on their research in the media, deploying researchers to make claims on their behalf, using radio phone-ins" and other tactics.

Horrobin wrote to General Nutrition, "Obviously you could not advertise Efamol for these purposes but equally obviously there are ways of getting the information across".

As a result, the FDA began to seize shipments of EPO and handed down felony indictments to General Nutrition, several executives and store managers for "conspiring to defraud the FDA and violating provisions of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act".

General Nutrition and its president entered guilty pleas and paid fines, but Horrobin was not prosecuted.

Efamol continued to ship EPO into the United States and to market its products.

Amidst charges of mismanagement and research fraud, Horrobin was ousted as CEO by a unanimous vote of the board and left the company in 1998.

In 2001, Scotia, one of the first publicly traded biotechnology companies in the United Kingdom, also became the first to collapse.

After Horrobin's departure from Scotia, he founded Laxdale Ltd., a company that investigated omega-3 fatty acids as possible treatments for schizophrenia and neurodegenerative diseases.

Horrobin died of pneumonia as a complication of mantle cell lymphoma in 2003.

Obituaries noted his contributions to the biotechnology industry, intellectual acumen, original thinking and adventurousness, while some criticised his promotion of primrose oil and other questionable claims.

Notably controversial obituaries in The Independent and the British Medical Journal angered Horrobin's friends and family by also portraying negative aspects of Horrobin's life, with the BMJ obituary stating that Horrobin "may prove to be the greatest snake oil salesman of his age".

Born in Bolton, England, Horrobin attended Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Blackburn, and King's College in Wimbledon.

He studied medicine on scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford, obtaining degrees in both medicine and surgery, and during the same period earned a doctorate in neurophysiology and neuroendocrinology.