An Improved Way to Develop Compounds For Pharmaceuticals

What do gunpowder, penicillin, and Teflon all share? They were innovations that took the globe by storm, but they were all developed by pure accident.

In a new research study announced in the journal Science, researchers used electrical power to establish equipment that can make it less complicated and cheaper to produce the compounds utilized in pharmaceuticals and other natural products. However, this innovation, too, joins the ranks of the many unexpected advancements that came before it.

Christo Sevov, a co-author of the investigation and an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University, belonged to a team that initially sought to prepare a catalyst that could be activated by electricity to make the bonds of the targeted drug compounds.

Compound research

Their research’s results suggest a general guideline for taking low-cost and extensively abundant materials and utilizing them to produce complex compounds that would not normally work together. Simplifying this chemical procedure could enable researchers to securely develop much more valuable products with fewer steps and waste.

To facilitate their chemical reactions in the lab, instead of utilizing high-energy reagents or added substances, as is standard when synthesizing materials, Sevov’s group used the power of electricity.

Since electricity is ecologically sustainable, there has been a recent push in the industrial sector to move towards the use of electrochemistry to cultivate chemical change.

“It is a very appealing way to do chemistry these days since we have full control over precisely how we run these reactions,” Sevov claimed.

Reaction catalysis

The study has wide applications in medicine and in the production of products like agrichemicals (like pesticides or herbicides) and specific plastics. Sevov’s discovery, while seemingly nonchalant, took great deals of hard work and patience to obtain.

“It took perhaps 3 months of testing various mixtures of ingredients, till suddenly something worked, and it worked very well,” Sevov claimed. “Reaching that complex allowed us to bind together materials that are extremely difficult to stitch together under normal circumstances.”

Because the precious metals many chemists utilize as catalysts can cost a lot, Sevov’s group selected a nickel atom as the catalyst for their tool. In chemistry, catalysts are responsible for increasing or lowering the rate of the chemical reaction as they make and produce bonds.

“Being able to make use of catalysts that are low-cost, like nickel, is extremely beneficial to the community as a whole,” he stated. Besides being an affordable alternative for businesses that manufacture pharmaceuticals, plastics, and polymers, utilizing nickel also keeps the cost of food products down. As an example, if farmers needed to pay much more for the agrichemicals these chemical reactions aid create, the cost of their plant would climb proportionally, Sevov stated.

Further research on pharmaceuticals

To improve their research, the team will go on to collaborate with Merck, an international pharmaceutical company, to attempt to produce other products using more difficult reactions and even more complex molecules. With their most recent discovery, Sevov claimed that he is confident that their work will start to produce new avenues in the field of chemistry.

“We will use this extremely reactive intermediate and see how much we can run with it,” Sevov said.

Co-authors involve Taylor Hamby and Matthew Lalama of Ohio State. The National Institutes of Health supported this research.

Read the original article on ScienceDaily.

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