Have you ever started looking for one thing, only to find something else altogether?
It’s called serendipity, and it happens when we begin to look for A, only to find B. And occasionally, B turns out to be a lot more useful than the thing we were searching for in the first place.
We’re all familiar with how this works around the house, like searching for the remote control only to find a handful of pennies under the couch cushions.
But this also happens in drug discovery, and more often than you might think. Were not for Alexander Fleming’s moldy petri dishes, penicillin might have taken decades to come across the medicinal radar. The same goes for insulin, a late 19th century discovery that started with the removal of a dog’s pancreas to study the role of the organ in digestion.
And then there’s the Viagra story, a medication originally intended to treat hypertension. We all know how that one turned out.
When you get a moment, check out the article below.
The Role of Serendipity in Drug Discovery
Happy Friday!
– J.M. Lanham