Shedding Light on the Elephant in a Dark Room in the Discovery of New Medicine: Highlighting Molecular Pharmaceutics within ACS Bio & Med Chem Au

Abstract

T parable of the “Blind men and an elephant” is a famous story in many cultures around the world. The story, which originated in the ancient Indian subcontinent, was retold by Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, in a poem named “The elephant in the dark room”. In the 19th century, the American poet John Godfrey Saxe made his own poem based on the story (The poems of John Godfrey Saxe/The Blind Men and the Elephant). The story tells us about six blind men, who have not seen an elephant before, approaching one in a dark room. They try to learn what the elephant is like by touching it. Each man feels a different part of the elephant’s body (its side, tusk, trunk etc.) and describes it based on their experience, which of course is different from the description of others and far from reality or the big picture. This tale is a great metaphor for the limitations of isolated scientific observation in the development of real and accurate knowledge and/or the translation of discoveries into impactful solutions for real-life problems. Reflecting on the lessons learned from this tale, as applied to the scientific world, reminds us of the need for a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach for producing impactful research, and this is particularly true for the drug development process. A medicine is much more than a molecule and its development requires contributions from different scientific disciplines including, but not limited to, medicinal and analytical chemists, biologists, and formulation scientists. The key to life-changing new discoveries in drug development is in the communication and exchange of ideas between scientific teams from these different disciplines. Recognizing the need for a fully open access, multidisciplinary scientific communication platform, particularly for scientists working in drug development, has led the American Chemical Society to launch ACS Bio & Med Chem Au. The journal, which is one of the nine gold (Au) open access journals, has a broad scope and showcases research from biological, medicinal, and pharmaceutical sciences to nurture communication and information sharing between scientists from different but related disciplines, and this is hugely useful for drug development research. ACS Bio & Med Chem Au particularly recognizes the importance of the molecular and mechanistic understanding of drug formulations as well as translational research in areas of pharmaceutical chemistry, existing and emerging drug delivery systems, biological performance of formulations, and other multidisciplinary research projects, especially those in the field of pharmaceutical development which are within the scope of Molecular Pharmaceutics. In this context, the journal welcomes submission of Articles, Letters, Perspectives, and Reviews with a focus on understanding the physicochemical properties of drugs and drug formulations (including small molecules, proteins, and genes) affecting their in vitro/in vivo function, the development of biological or bioinspired or synthetic delivery systems for current and future medicine, as well as translational research within the field of drug development. Our goal is to encourage the sharing and communication of ideas between different disciplines involved in the drug development process to better understand scientific observations and their translation to real-life solutions for healthrelated problems. The fact that the journal is fully open access further improves accessibility to those in industry, academia, as well as the general public. Without a doubt, the rate of research advancement and new discoveries within the biomedical field has witnessed exponential growth within the past few decades. The development of new biochemical and analytical tools enabling the elucidation of molecular mechanisms behind observations in biological systems has played a critical role in this growth. Collaborative and/or multidisciplinary research has also played a decisive part in the advancement of research and led to many groundbreaking scientific developments. It is no coincidence that the Nobel Prize in Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology and Medicine, particularly in the past four decades, has often been awarded to multiple scientists, each playing a complementary role in an important discovery or translation of the discovery to an intervention that can change human lives. In many instances, these scientists made their contributions a few years or decades apart. For instance, the 1984 noble prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded to Niels K. Jerne, Georges J. F. Köhler, and Ceśar Milstein “for theories concerning the specificity in development and control of the immune system and the discovery of the principle for production of monoclonal antibodies”. These scientists made their individual contributions to the idea of specificity