Oddity stories of drug discovery ... Viagra, penicillin and lithium

Many drugs were not invented premeditatedly, and their discovery came by chance, to which the example of "Lord of chance is better than a thousand times" applies, and in this report we learn about the story of 3 drugs that were discovered by chance, namely Viagra, Penicillin and Lithium.

Viagra .. From the heart to erectile dysfunction

Viagra is made by a group of pharmaceutical chemists working for the Pfizer company in England. The researchers initially studied the use of this drug to treat high blood pressure and angina, and the first clinical trials were conducted at Morriston Hospital in Swansea, UK.

Viagra was discovered to be effective by accidentally treating erectile dysfunction. Researchers were initially studying with a view to treating cardiovascular problems, as the blood vessels in the heart were supposed to dilate by blocking a specific protein called PDE-5 in Animal tests.

When testing animals, it seemed that "Sildenville" was working well, as researchers found evidence that it was blocking BDE-5, and there were no clear negative side effects on animals.

So Sildenville was introduced to clinical trials in humans in the early 1990s, but the bad news was that initial results showed that the drug had little effect on angina.

The strange news was what the nurses who supervised the men participating in the study noticed, as John Lamatina (who was the head of research and development at Pfizer during the course of this research) said that the nurses noticed that when the men were examined, many of them were lying on their stomachs, and they were embarrassed because they They feel an erection.

It turned out that the dilated blood vessels were not in the heart but in the penis, and because the expansion of the blood vessels is an essential part of the process that leads to erection, the result was amazing, so Pfizer decided to market this drug to treat erectile dysfunction, not angina.

The patent was registered in 1996, and its use in erectile dysfunction treatment was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration on March 27, 1998, becoming the first oral treatment for erectile dysfunction in the United States.

Viagra has become one of the biggest successes in the history of the pharmaceutical industry. Its annual sales in 2008 amounted to $ 1.934 billion, and since 2012 the United States, Mexico and Canada have spent about $ 1.4 billion annually.

Penicillin .. a coincidence of mold

In 1928, scientist Alexander Fleming accidentally observed that mold was able to counteract the growth of pathogenic microbes, a discovery that later led to the invention of the first antibiotic; Penicillin.

This is the most well-known example when it comes to discoveries made by chance, writes Sylvie Logone, in a report published by the Swiss newspaper "Letemps". We owe it to Alexander Fleming to discover penicillin, which opened the age of antibiotics, and enabled this world to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1945.

In September 1928, at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London, Fleming, as a pharmacy expert, was studying enzymes capable of attacking the cellular walls of bacteria, and using staphylococci for this purpose. He used to leave his laboratory, leaving him in complete chaos. A month after the leave, he found Petri dishes (test plates devoted to culturing and testing cells) stacked in a tank mostly covered with staphylococcus, but he noticed a mold-like substance in one of them, apparently inhibiting bacterial growth.

The dishes in question were contaminated with strains of microscopic fungi called "penicillium nunatum", and after surprising him with this remark, Fleming planted the mold in a solution, and observed that its antibacterial properties could be reproduced, and the antibiotic derived from the mold was called penicillin.

Towards mass production operations

On February 13, 1929, Fleming presented his research findings to the Medical Research Club, which was met with a kind of indifference, then published an article on May 10 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology unnoticed.

In 1938, English pathologist Howard Florey and German biochemist Ernst Chen resumed his research. In 1940, they succeeded in isolating and purifying penicillin, but the quantities obtained were insignificant, and it was not enough to provide the two thousand liters of pure mold needed to treat a patient.

Fleury turned to UK drug companies to help him mass-produce penicillin, but his request was turned down. At the time, the country was suffering from the horrors of World War II; So he decided to go to the United States in June 1941, there he succeeded in persuading a research laboratory in Peoria, Illinois, to expand the scope of penicillium, and to demonstrate how important this substance is to pharmaceutical manufacturers such as Merck & Co., Pfizer, and Bristol- Myers Squibb. " With the United States entering the war in 1941, penicillin became a national priority.

In 1945, more than 600 billion doses of penicillin were manufactured by pharmaceutical companies, saving thousands of lives.

Lithium ... the incredible treatment for bipolar patients

Lithium has revolutionized the lives of millions of people with mental health problems, keeping them away from resorting to manufactured medicines.

In her report published by the Swiss newspaper "Luton", the writer Catherine Framray said that bipolar disease, or what was previously known as "manic depression", affects between 1 and 2.5% of the world's population.

The discoverer of the role of lithium in treating this disease was the Australian psychiatrist John Kidd, born in 1912, who is the son of a psychiatrist with deep knowledge of mental disorders, especially since at that time the therapists were living near their patients. And support the idea that the brain - like other organs - can be exposed to diseases that can be cured.

During World War II, Kidd was arrested for more than 3 years at the Japanese POW camp in Changi, Singapore. He was assigned to the Department of Psychiatry, where he began to notice the crucial relationship between some nutritional deficiencies and diseases in his fellow prisoners, according to Nature.

For her part, author Framry said that John Kidd noticed that the concentration of uric acid in the urine of people with a different mental illness, and assumed a link between mental status and biological or organic changes. It is an approach that completely contradicts the idea that interprets depression as anger, which the person puts himself in and delays the cause of mental disorders to lack of education.

When he returned to Australia, the doctor set himself up for work, and he himself in a cellar in Bondura Hospital, collecting urine samples for mania or depression patients, storing them and then injecting increasing doses into the hamster. Lithium carbonate, which had been used since the 16th century to treat gout, was being tested.

His wife recounts that he was overjoyed when he noticed that the little rodents had become quiet, or even very quiet. John Kidd had a professional conscience, as he had swallowed lithium for several weeks to make sure he was non-toxic. Then he tests it on patients. 5 of them recovered in astonishing way, but one of them died after being provided with strong doses, and Kidd then felt very frustrated.

Adjust the correct doses?

The writer added that the results of his experiments, published in 1949, caught the eye, and the research focused on controlling the correct dose. Nowadays, it becomes possible for a mental patient to resume his normal life within 10 to 15 days without resorting to electric shocks, nor surgery.