In 1926, Roehl demonstrated that pamaquine was effective in treating malaria in birds, and introduced it into use in humans.

[5] Its development is of interest in the history of pharmacotherapy because it was one of the early victories in validating the potential of applying organic chemistry to the synthesis of chemicals that would fight infections with good specificity while presenting adverse effect profiles small enough that benefit would outweigh harm, relative to the contemporary alternative of little to no efficacious treatment for many debilitating diseases.

In other words, it expanded the evidence that the hope for great potential of antimicrobial chemotherapy shown by Paul Ehrlich and others was worth pursuing with more research[2]: 88–91 —and that early wins such as arsphenamine were more than just isolated flukes.

This was a time period when organic chemistry's largest economic applications included textile dyes, explosives, munitions, and chemical weapons but not yet pharmaceuticals.

The fact that systematic, iterative experiments had eventually synthesized an antimalarial drug that was 30 times more effective than quinine[2]: 91  while being safe enough to use (relative to the bleak alternatives of the era) supported the concept of modern pharmaceutical research laboratories as it would develop in coming decades.