Willow active extract of the bark, called salicin, was isolated to its crystalline form in 1828 by Henri Leroux, a French pharmacist, and Raffaele Piria, an Italian chemist, who then succeeded in separating out the compound in its pure state. In 1897, Felix Hoffmann created a synthetically altered version of salicin (in his case derived from the "Spiraea" plant), which caused less digestive upset than pure salicylic acid. The new drug, formally acetylsalicylic acid, was named Aspirin by Hoffmann's employer Bayer AG. This gave rise to the hugely important class of drugs known as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). Some of humans'
Bisdehydrodoisynolic acid Bisdehydrodoisynolic acid Bisdehydrodoisynolic acid (BDDA), as the (Z)-isomer ((Z)-BDDA), is a synthetic, nonsteroidal estrogen related to doisynolic acid that was never marketed. It is one of the most potent estrogens known, although it has more recently been characterized as a selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM). BDDA and other doisynolic acid derivatives display relatively low affinity accompanied by disproportionately high estrogenic potency "in vivo", which was eventually determined to be due to transformation into metabolites with greater estrogenic activity. The drug was discovered in 1947 as a degradation product of the reaction of equilenin or dihydroequilenin with potassium hydroxide. It is