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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 Nuke on Monday January 22 2018, @01:20PM (2 children)
This is simply a proposal to synthesise organic chemicals on a small scale. The authors have tossed in the idea of making the containment vessels by 3-D printing in order to get attention, although they could just as use moulded vessels. As a weasel-phrase, "3-D Printing" works like that. It used to be "Using a computer", then it was "Digital technology", now it's "3-D Printing". Actually, TFA uses both those last two.
If they had not said "3-D Printing" somewhere, no-one would have noticed this article. And don't expect to be doing this at home "someday soon". The Year of Linux on the desktop will happen before that. By "local" (it does not say "at home"), TFA means in your region rather than on the other side of the World.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 22 2018, @01:30PM
It still has the potential to be revolutionary, even if 3D printing was only a small part of the process. Here is a 2012 article about the same researcher:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jul/21/chemputer-that-prints-out-drugs [theguardian.com]
Different buzzword which is all too applicable to what they have published here.
You're wrong that nobody would have noticed this article if it did not contain "3d printing" (which the experiment does). SIMPLY "a proposal to synthesise organic chemicals on a small scale" could SIMPLY lead to the ability of amateurs to create drugs at home with no complicated chemistry knowledge, or create drugs in constrained environments such as a space station. Oops, I added another buzzphrase! Deep Space Gateway! Deeeeeep Spaaaaace Gaaaaatewaaay!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @02:36PM
I can tie my shoes digitally.
If more people knew latin, explaining some things would be simpler...