Nils Löfgren

Nils Löfgren was born on 18 August 1913 and died on 21 January 1967. Löfgren was a Swedish chemist who developed the anaesthetic Lidocaine (under the name Xylocaine) in 1943 and isolated the purine nucleoside antibiotic nebularine in 1953.

At the time Löfgren developed Lidocaine, he had recently finished his licentiate degree and was teaching organic chemistry at the Stockholm University. He and his co-worker Bengt Lundqvist sold the rights to Xylocaine to the Swedish pharmaceutical company Astra AB. In 1948, Löfgren completed his doctorate, and the title of his dissertation was Studies on local anesthetics: Xylocaine: a new synthetic drug. He later became professor of organic chemistry at the Stockholm University.