Selegiline was discovered in Hungary in the 1960s. Joseph Knoll, a chair of pharmacology at the Semmelweis University in Budapest, was interested in the physiology of "drive" and the differences between high- and low-performing individuals. For his research, he required a molecule that combined amphetamine-like psychostimulant effect with a "psycho-energic" effect of
monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI). To do that, he decided to combine in the same molecule the structural features of the MAOI
pargyline and the psychostimulant
amphetamine. Knoll was a close friend of Meszaros, the research director of Chinoin, a Hungarian pharmaceutical company (later sold off to Sanofi). For this project, Meszaros put Knoll in contact with a chemist called Ecsery who worked in Chinoin in the field of phenethylamines. Ecsery made about 30 compounds, and Knoll selected the molecule of E-250 (deprenyl) based on its surprising properties. "The great discovery" (in Knoll's words) was that the new molecule did not increase blood pressure, unlike amphetamine, and moreover, it inhibited the blood pressure raising effect of amphetamine. The first publication on deprenyl in Hungarian appeared in 1964, followed by a paper in English in 1965. Deprenyl is a racemic compound, a mixture of two isomers called enantiomers. For the further pharmaceutical development, Knoll chose the (−)-enantiomer of deprenyl, which caused less hypermotility than the opposite (+)-enantiomer. This (−)-enantiomer (l-deprenyl, R-deprenyl) later has come to be called selegiline.
Selegiline is partly
metabolized to
l-methamphetamine, one of the two
enantiomers of
methamphetamine in vivo. Now I know why selegiline gives energy and mood. This is partially a real amphetamine!
Edited by Dan Brown, 04 October 2012 - 05:07 PM.