by Alice Clark
In the 1970s, an exciting discovery of a family of medicines was made by the Japanese scientist Satoshi Ōmura. It is one of these molecules which features in this artwork, created by Alice Clark from PDBe. It shows ivermectin bound in the ligand binding pocket of the Farnesoid X receptor, a protein which helps regulate cholesterol in humans. This structure showed that ivermectin induced transcriptional activity of FXR and could be used to regulate metabolism. The scientists suggest FXR as a potential mammalian drug target of ivermectin.