How CM8 was discovered
The story of cetyl myristoleate begins not with arthritis, but with sugar chemistry — and a chemist who couldn’t make mice sick.
The story of how cetyl myristoleate was discovered, isolated and synthesized starts in Bethesda, Maryland, in the early 1960s. It was there that Dr. Harry W. Diehl worked at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. government’s principal agency for medical research.
Diehl was no arthritis specialist. His field was sugar synthesis — in fact, his synthesis of 2-deoxy-D-ribose supported polio-vaccine research of the period. (The injectable polio vaccine of that era is associated with Dr. Jonas Salk; the later oral vaccine with Dr. Albert Sabin.) But Diehl took a personal interest in arthritis when a friend developed a severe case, and he turned his own bench work toward the problem, hoping to find something useful.
The mice that wouldn’t get sick
He started where many researchers do — with mice. It was already established that a substance called Mycobacterium butyricum, known as Freund’s adjuvant, reliably induces arthritis-like inflammation when injected into susceptible animals.
To Diehl’s surprise, the mice didn’t respond. No matter how he tried, he could not induce the condition in them. That pointed to one explanation: something about the mice was protecting them.
Isolating the compound
Working on his own and in his spare time, Diehl used thin-layer chromatography on extracts prepared from the mice. It was slow, tedious work, but he eventually isolated and identified the responsible compound: cetyl myristoleate.
Recreating it in the lab
Isolating a compound from mice is not a practical way to produce it. So Diehl developed a method to synthesize cetyl myristoleate — combining cetyl alcohol with myristoleic acid through esterification — and reported that the synthesized form behaved comparably to the naturally occurring form in his animal work.
With that, cetyl myristoleate — later marketed as CM8 — could be made in quantity. What began as a question about sugar chemistry had become a discovery in its own right.
Next: the patents and the research that followed the discovery, or the quick facts about the compound itself.