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

RecommendationsT he 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

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