Vol 8, No 3 - Drug Discovery and Proof of Concept
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Definition of serendipity erendip is the old Arabic name for Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka.The origin of the word “serendipity” is in a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, whose traveling heroes were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”1 In the 16th century, the tale was translated from Persian to Italian, and from Italian to French. Horace Walpole (1717-1797), an English man of letters, encoun- tered it in a collection of oriental tales in French, and coined the English term “serendipity” in a letter to his friend, Horace Mann, dated June 28, 1754.2 Today, the word “serendipity” is a word that is used in everyday language.The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the faculty of making happy and unexpected discov- eries by accident,” and Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary as “the faculty of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.”3 In Stedman’s Medical Dictionary “serendip- ity” refers to “an accidental discovery;” ie, “finding one thing while looking for something else.”4 According to the Doctor Out of Zebulon column in the Archives of Internal Medicine, “serendipity signifies a mental state in which serenity and stupidity are blended,” as for example,“the serendipity of a cow chewing its cud under a shady tree,” or “the sort of thing that happens to you when on a dull day collecting fossils you find instead a beautiful woman who proves to be neither geologist nor archeologist.”5,6 However, this definition is erroneous, at least insofar as scientific discoveries are concerned. No scientific discovery has ever been made by pure luck.All happy accidents in science have one point in common: “each was recognized, evaluated and acted upon in the 3 3 5 C l i n i c a l  r e s e a r c h S Copyright © 2006 LLS SAS.  All rights reserved www.dialogues-cns.org The role of serendipity in drug discovery Thomas A. Ban, MD, FRCP(C) Keywords: chloral  hydrate;  chlorpromazine;  imipramine;  iproniazid;  lithium; lysergic acid diethylamide; meprobamate; penicillin; serendipity; sildenafil Author affiliations: Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, Vanderbilt  University, Nashville, Tenn, USA Address for correspondence: Prof Thomas A. Ban, 1177 Yonge Street, Suite 607, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4T 2Y4 (e-mail: fmcp@allstream.net) Serendipity is one of the many factors that may contribute to drug discovery. It has played a role in the discovery of prototype psychotropic drugs that led to modern phar- macological treatment in psychiatry. It has also played a role in the discovery of several drugs that have had an impact on the development of psychiatry. “Serendipity” in drug discovery implies the finding of one thing while look- ing for something else. This was the case in six of the twelve serendipitous discoveries reviewed in this paper, ie, aniline  purple,  penicillin,  lysergic  acid  diethylamide, meprobamate, chlorpromazine, and imipramine. In the case of three drugs, ie, potassium bromide, chloral hydrate, and lithium, the discovery was serendipitous because an utterly false rationale led to correct empirical results; and in case of two others, ie, iproniazid and sildenafil, because valuable indications were found for these drugs which were not initially those sought. The discovery of one of the twelve drugs, chlordiazepoxide, was sheer luck. © 2006, LLS SAS Dialogues Clin Neurosci. 2006;8:335-344.