ACS Honors the Discovery of Ivermectin

This month the American Chemical Society designated the discovery of ivermectin as a National Historic Chemical Landmark in a ceremony at Merck & Co., Inc., in Rahway, New Jersey. Why is the discovery of ivermectin such an important achievement in the history of chemistry?

The story starts when a scientist discovers a lowly bacterium near a golf course outside Tokyo. A team of scientists in the United States finds that the bacterium produces compounds that impede the activity of nematode worms. It is developed into a drug that wards off parasites in countless pets and farm animals, averting billions of dollars in losses worldwide. Extraordinarily, the drug also prevents or treats human parasitic diseases that would otherwise cause blindness and other severe symptoms in hundreds of millions of people in many of the poorest countries on Earth. Yet none of this would have happened without that soil dug up in Japan—and a healthy dose of serendipity.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Satoshi Omura, a microbiologist and bioorganic chemist at Tokyo’s Kitasato Institute, hunted for new sources of pharmaceuticals. He knew that some existing drugs, including antibiotics, had been derived from compounds found in nature. So he developed screening methods to identify medicinally promising compounds from soil. His team collected thousands of soil samples from around Japan, cultured bacteria from them, and screened each culture for medicinal potential.

Read the full article here:  http://axial.acs.org/2016/12/02/discovery-of-ivermectin/