History
Nicotine has been known for centuries for its intoxicating effect. It was first isolated in 1828 from the tobacco plant by German chemists, Posselt and Reimann.
The discovery of positive effects from nicotine on animal memory was discovered by in vivo researches in the middle of the 1980s. Those researches led to a new era in studies of nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) and their stimulation but until then the focus had mainly been on nicotine addiction. The development of nAChR agonists began in the early 1990s after the discovery of nicotine’s positive effects. Some research showed a possible therapy option in preclinical researches. ABT-418 was one of the first in a series of nAChR agonists and it was designed by Abbott Labs. ABT-418 showed significant increase of delayed matching-to-sample (DMTS) performance in matured Macaque apes of different species and sex. ABT-418 has also been examined as a possible treatment to Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: those experiments showed positive outcomes.
One of the first nAChR active compounds, besides nicotine, that was marketed as a drug was galantamine, a plant alkaloid that works as a weak cholinesterase inhibitor (IC50=5µM) as well as an allosteric sensitizer for nAChRs (EC50=50 nM).
Read more about this topic: Nicotinic Agonist
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History takes time.... History makes memory.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)