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from the because-we-already-know-how-to-make-our-own-booze dept.
Forget those long lines at the pharmacy: Someday soon, you might be making your own medicines at home. That's because researchers have tailored a 3D printer to synthesize pharmaceuticals and other chemicals from simple, widely available starting compounds fed into a series of water bottle–size reactors. The work, they say, could digitize chemistry, allowing users to synthesize almost any compound anywhere in the world.
"It could become a milestone paper, a really seminal paper," says Fraser Stoddart, a chemist and chemistry Nobel laureate at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who was not involved with the work. "This is one of those articles that has to make [people] sit up and take notice."
[...] In today's issue of Science, [Leroy] Cronin and his colleagues report printing a series of interconnected reaction vessels that carry out four different chemical reactions involving 12 separate steps, from filtering to evaporating different solutions. By adding different reagents and solvents at the right times and in a precise order, they were able to convert simple, widely available starting compounds into a muscle relaxant called baclofen. And by designing reactionware to carry out different chemical reactions with different reagents, they produced other medicines, including an anticonvulsant and a drug to fight ulcers and acid reflux.
[...] But it remains to be seen whether drug regulators will go along with a new way of making medicines. To do so, agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will need to rewrite their rules for validating the safety of medicines. Instead of signing off on the production facility and manufactured drug samples, regulators would have to validate that reactionware produces the desired medication.
Source: ScienceMag
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 22 2018, @12:18PM
One way for the individual to "easily" "print" drugs would be to use genetically engineered yeast:
'Home-Brewed Morphine' Made Possible [soylentnews.org]
Genetically Engineered Yeasts Produce Thebaine and Hydrocodone [soylentnews.org]
To my knowledge, the genomes of those yeast have not been published, and they aren't available outside of the small number of labs that work on them. If anyone knows any differently or knows any other drugs that have been produced by engineered yeast, let us know.
The yeast approach would be an imperfect way of producing the drugs you want, but maybe there are ways to extend the approach. For example, engineer a switch statement [wikipedia.org] in the genome that lets one strain of yeast produce up to 10 different drugs based on some external factor (such as a chemical or light trigger). You could see a problem happening with that approach, such as some % of the yeast mutating or not working properly, mixing a little hydrocodone into your LSD. But that could be averted by using a centrifuge or something else inside your machine to separate the desired drug from any unwanted components.
At least one proposed chemputer [theguardian.com] does not use any GMO yeast but simply uses novel approaches to chemical reactions in order to miniaturize them and combine steps into a single machine that could produce more than one drug:
Innovations like microfluidic channels [nature.com] are probably going to be very relevant for the hypothetical chemputer.
Just because a yeast strain or chemputer could create morphine [wikipedia.org] does not mean that the effort will easily translate to a general approach capable of creating thousands of molecules, including LSD, ibuprofen [wikipedia.org], VX [wikipedia.org], rophynol [wikipedia.org], TNT [wikipedia.org], etc., all in the same machine with a push of a button. But we could be moving ever closer in that direction, so expect the authoritarians in government to be keeping a close eye on this field.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]