When was valium introduced

His uncle Leon was a professor of classical philology at the Jagiellonian University and his father had graduated from pharmaceutical faculty at the same university. Another uncle, Edward, ran a large law practice in the city. In Leo took up a scholarship in Vienna after working as an assistant in the Organic Chemistry department at the Jagiellonian University. Three years later he moved to Zurich where he started working for Hoffman-la Roche.

The firm organised the relocation of all their Jewish employees to the United States in , with the Swiss government giving passports to non-citizens. It was in the US that he came up with Valium, a benzodiazepine, in , and, in a way, changed the world. Google Street View. Leo Sternbach, the medicinal chemist who soothed the anxieties of a generation of Americans with the invention of Librium and Valium, died Wednesday at his home in Chapel Hill, N.

He was The discovery was an impressive achievement for a project he was not even supposed to be working on. The saga began in when Wallace Pharmaceuticals brought out an anti-anxiety drug called Miltown that was then thought -- wrongly, it was learned later -- to be free of the many adverse side effects that afflicted barbiturates, the most widely used drugs for anxiety at the time.

Instead, he followed a hunch about some compounds he had studied as potential dyes years earlier in Poland. Their structures, he reasoned, could interact favorably with the human nervous system. But two years of research proved fruitless, and his bosses told him to drop the project and switch to the development of antibiotics.

Sternbach began working on the germ-killers, but he kept tinkering with the dyes. Within two years, he and his colleagues -- especially chemist Earl Reeder -- had discovered the first benzodiazepine. As they did with other potential anti-anxiety drugs, they tested it on mice that were placed at the bottom of a steeply inclined screen. Normal mice climb the screen easily. Drugged mice relax and slide back down, where they mingle in a group torpor. With the new drug, the mice also relaxed and slid back down.

Previously, patients were given opiates — with predictably disastrous results. Then came barbiturates, which were also written off as too addictive. After that, doctors began prescribing anti-psychotic drugs known as phenothiazines, but those drugs triggered severe side-effects such as uncontrollable facial movements.

In the s, the late Leo Sternbach — a research chemist — began tinkering with an unknown class of compounds: the BZDs, or benzodiazepines. Over several years, he tested some 40 BZDs but all proved ineffective. Finally in , after adding methylamine a colourless gas derived from ammonia to one compound, he produced a white powder that made mice sleepy and calm.

The Food and Drug Administration approved Librium, the first-ever benzodiazepine, in and Valium in Benzodiazepines latch onto a receptor in the brain, which then activates a neighbouring neurotransmitter known as GABA.