At the heart of modern medicine is a variety of life-saving drugs developed by chemists. On August 11, the American Chemical Society’s journal Chemical & Engineering News, in a special issue commemorating the 100th anniversary of the society’s founding, listed five landmark drugs that have emerged over the past century and changed the face of medical practice, the science of drug discovery and society.
Penicillin: Saved millions of lives
Penicillin is one of the first antibiotics and has saved millions of lives since its introduction.
In 1928, Alexander Fleming, a British bacteriologist, biochemist and microbiologist, discovered the drug in moldy petri dishes. Eleven years later, Howard Walter Florey and Ernst Chain of Oxford University confirmed the bactericidal properties of penicillin in mice and tested them in humans. In 1941, a police officer in Oxford, England, became the first person to be treated with penicillin, although he eventually died from insufficient supplies of the antibiotic.
In 1945, Fleming, Chain and Florey shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery, research and improvement of penicillin and its successful use in the treatment of patients.
Today, although scientists have developed many other antibiotics, penicillin is still one of the most commonly used antibiotics in the world.
Chlorpromazine: Direct treatment of mental illness
Chlorpromazine was one of the first drugs to treat mental illness directly. Chlorpromazine was first synthesized in December 1950 by chemists at the Ronne Planck chemical Group in France. At that time, treatments for psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia were not only ineffective, but often came with risks.
But chlorpromazine was not originally developed to treat mental illness. In January 1952, Henri labory, a French doctor, convinced colleagues to give chlorpromazine and several other drugs to a 24-year-old mentally ill man. After 3 weeks of treatment, the patient successfully recovered enough to be discharged.
Since then, many psychiatric patients around the world have been treated with chlorpromazine. Smith Klein and Franso (formerly GlaxoSmithKline) bought the rights to sell the drug in North America. Chlorpromazine was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1954 and became one of the most successful new drugs, earning the company $10 million in one year.
Although a number of new antipsychotics have since emerged, chlorpromazine is still used today. Its success proved that psychosis could be treated chemically, ushered in a new era of psychopharmacology, and changed the practice of psychiatry forever.
Oral contraceptives: Empowering women to plan their families
The oral contraceptive pill has been hailed as an important discovery affecting the course of humanity.
Scientists have known since the 1920s that injecting reproductive hormones such as progesterone into animals can prevent pregnancy, but direct use of progesterone as a drug has faced multiple challenges because progesterone must be injected in large amounts or taken orally to have an effect in humans.
In 1951, chemists Carl Gerassi, Louis Miramontes, and George Rosenkranz synthesized the first progesterone analogue, Norethisterone, which was effective orally at low doses, opening the door to the development of oral contraceptives. A year later, chemist Frank Colton synthesized a similar compound, norethisterone.
In 1957, the US FDA approved the first Enovid, a combination of norethinone and mestronol, to treat menstrual disorders, and in 1960 it was first approved as an oral contraceptive, which gave women the right to plan their families.
Antiretroviral drugs: turning deadly diseases into manageable chronic diseases
Tenofovir alafinamide, entriptibine and Doluticgravir are three of the more than 30 antiretroviral therapy (ART) drugs used to treat HIV. ART has transformed AIDS from a terrible and fatal disease into a manageable chronic disease.
ART’s success is due to the efforts of countless researchers in academia, government, and industry. In the 1980s, AIDS was discovered, making people “smell color change.” In 1987, the US FDA approved the first antiviral drug Zidovudine, providing the first weapon in the human fight against HIV. It prevents the virus from replicating by inhibiting its reverse transcriptase.
Scientists realized that to control HIV, multiple stages of the viral replication cycle needed to be targeted. In 1995, the FDA approved saquinavir, the first protease inhibitor to treat HIV. The following year, doctors reported that HIV levels in patients who received the cocktail therapy rapidly dropped to undetectable levels. Between 1996 and 1999, the AIDS death rate in the United States and Europe fell by more than 50 percent.
Since then, more antiretroviral drugs have been introduced, with fewer and fewer side effects. Doctors now start antiretroviral treatment immediately after diagnosis of HIV infection, not only reducing morbidity and mortality, but also reducing the chance of transmission of the virus. People who are at high risk of infection can also take these medications as prevention.
Imatinib: Opening the door to precision cancer therapy
Cancer is characterized by a group of abnormal cells that grow and spread uncontrollably. Targeted therapies have revolutionized cancer treatment and can improve patient survival and quality of life.
Imatinib (Gleevec) is one such treatment. It is one of the first precision therapies designed to target specific genetic mutations that cause cancer, inhibiting the growth of cancer cells by selectively targeting specific molecules involved in their growth.
In 2001, the FDA first approved imatinib for the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), and the results showed that the drug demonstrated a miraculous effect, increasing the 5-year survival rate of patients with CML from 30% to approximately 90%, successfully opening a new era of precision cancer therapy.
ABOUT US
