Health Sciences · Temerty Faculty of Medicine
A small (1.5 cm diameter) glass vial with a cork stopper contains a small amount of white crystalline powder. The cork stopper is lined with a metal foil where it meets the mouth of the vial. The vial is marked with a red and white paper label featuring handwritten text.
Accession Number: 2026.med.66
Alternative Name:
Primary Materials: Glass
Written on paper label: “Crystalline// Barium Acid// Salt of Heparin// 9-29-41// O. S. U.// D. I.
Dimensions (cm): Height = 5.9, Max Diam. = 1.5.
This sample is likely a highly purified form of heparin that was used as a standard for measuring the potency of heparin prepared by Connaught Laboratories. The Connaught barium heparin standard also served as an early international standard.
This artifact appears intact. Portions of the lettering on the paper label have faded substantially, but are still legible.
Associated Instruments:
Connaught Laboratories, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON.
Date of Manufacture: 29 September 1941
Provenance:
Arthur F. Charles and David A. Scott (1936). “Studies on Heparin: IV: Observations on the chemistry of heparin.” Biochemical Journal, 30 (10), 1927–1933.
Donald W. G. (“Gordon”) Murray, Louis B. Jaques, Thomas S. Perrett, and Charles H. Best. (1937) “Heparin and the Thrombosis of Veins Following Injury.” In Selected Papers of Charles H. Best. University of Toronto Press, 2015.
Charles H. Best (1959). “Preparation of Heparin and Its Use in the First Clinical Cases.” Circulation. 19, 1: 79–86.
D. R. Bangham and Marjorie V. Mussett, (1959) The Second International Standard for Heparin. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 20(6), 1201 – 1208.
Heparin, an anticoagulant biological drug, was developed for clinical use by a group led by Toronto-based chemist Charles Best (1899-1978). Development of heparin took place at Connaught Laboratories as well as the University of Toronto Departments of Surgery and Physiology. It involved several collaborators including Drs. David A. Scott (1892-1971) and Arthur F. Charles (1905-1972), who did much of the underlying biochemical development.
As part of the process of developing a purified extract, Scott and Charles produced a barium salt of heparin in an effort to create “highly active preparations of uniform activity” (see Charles and Scott 1936, 1928). Successful clinical trials using this early purified barium salt heparin began at Toronto General Hospital under Dr. Gordon Murray (1896-1976) in May 1935. The account of these trials notes, in part: “A standard of heparin has been set up in Connaught Laboratories and the heparin which we have used has always been compared with this preparation” (Murray et al. 1963/ 1937, 629).
The instructional literature from a commercial sample of sodium heparin produced by Abbott Laboratories in 1946 notes the following: “The “Toronto unit” is defined as the anticoagulant activity contained in 0.1 milligram of a certain standard of barium heparin which has been set aside by the University of Toronto.”
This Connaught barium heparin standard was used to calculate the First International Standard for Heparin by the World Health Organization in 1947. (See Bangham and Mussett 1959.)