Robert Oberlender
American medicinal chemist
Robert Arthur Oberlender (born July 25, 1956) is an American medicinal chemist known for his work in the areas of serotonergic and dopaminergic drugs as well as drug discrimination. He is most well known for his discovery and development of lisdexamfetamine (lysine–dextroamphetamine), which is now marketed as a pharmaceutical drug under the brand name Vyvanse and is prescribed as a misuse-resistant stimulant in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other conditions.
Biography
Oberlender attended the pharmacy school of Temple University in his hometown of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, receiving a bachelor's degree, and worked for two years as a pharmacist. Then, he started a Ph.D. program in medicinal chemistry at Purdue University in 1981. He worked in the lab of psychedelic chemist David E. Nichols studying psychedelics, entactogens, and related drugs, first completing his Ph.D. and then continuing in the lab as a postdoc. His first publication with the lab was in 1984 and his last publication with the group was in 1995, a period spanning more than 10 years. His Ph.D. thesis, published in 1989, was on stereoselective actions of psychedelics, including the lysergamides LA-Aziridine and LA-3Cl-SB and the DOx drugs DOIB and DOSB, as well as on drug discrimination studies of entactogens, including MDA, MDMA, MBDB, and MDAI.
Oberlender personally self-experimented with some of the psychoactive drugs synthesized in the Nichols lab. In the mid-1990s, he tried the obscure psychedelic tryptamine 5-MeO-pyr-T, a synthetic analogue of 5-MeO-DMT, and accidentally took too high of a dose of it without a trip sitter present. While under the influence of 5-MeO-pyr-T, Oberlender stripped naked, began wandering the Purdue University campus in a fugue state, and was apprehended by campus police. His case did not end up going to court, but the incident did result in Oberlender having to leave Nichols's lab.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert Oberlender” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.