The Genesis of the Antiparasitic Drug lvermectin

Abstract

Abstract It was not a neat event; it is not a “gee whiz” story. No cerebral light bulb flashed the form and function of ivermectin on anybody’s mental screen. Nor was the discovery of this new drug the result of an industrial research team’s deciding to take existing scientific knowledge at point A and develop it to point B, where it would yield a product to be sold. Nor, yet again, was it a matter of chance, in which some industrial Princes of Serendipe sailed to an antiparasitic landing while bound for other therapeutic territory. No, it was a complicated and unglamorous mixture of all of these. That is not as trite as it may seem, for all of those kinds of discovery do happen in the context of modern industrial research. I have been asked to tell the story, despite my warnings about its intrinsically untidy nature, and am emboldened by assurances that an examination of any such real-life situation would be, if not pleasing, at least edifying. My excuse for accepting the invitation to tell the story myself is that I was, in Dean Acheson’s sense of the phrase, “present at the creation.” I speak as a parasitologist; and the parasitology effort, after all, provided as good a vantage point as any from which to observe the emergence of what was to become a major antiparasitic drug.