SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday January 22 2018, @02:59PM (1 child)
This is kinda the chemistry equivalent of writing "hello world" thus proving that ALL programming can be replaced by five minutes of noob work. Its not that simple. I looked up the product and was impressed with how bucket chemist it was.
I'm assuming they're doing:
http://icc.journals.pnu.ac.ir/article_1893_296.html [pnu.ac.ir]
So if you have p-chlorobenzaldehyde and ethyl acetoacetate laying around the house in usable qtys, then its not much more complicated than cooking to abuse it further with COTS potassium hydroxide, ammonium hydroxide, and sodium hydroxide which are admittedly pretty stereotypical household chemicals.
There are scaling problems. Secret Sauce number one is p-chlorobenzaldehyde and Sigma Aldrich will (LOL, not) ship you a min qty of enough to get an entire college high for $27, and secret sauce two is ethyl acetoacetate which is an artificial "fruity" flavor which in theory could be made at home by a dedicated chemist, but probably not. If you have a source of ethyl acetate solvent, then maybe you could make ethyl acetoacetate at home. Sigma Aldrich (I swear I don't work for them, although a chemistry classmate ended up there, I think) is like $100 for a kilogram which is a lot.
The point of looking up cost and availability of the secret sauce(s) is the semi-addictive GHB-alike they're pushing home synthesis of, is like $20 for prescription in the US (assuming no insurance). So if you're trying to self-medicate its going to be a hell of a lot cheaper WRT minimum shipments of secret sauce(s) to take legit big pharma, the only purpose of home synthesis would be to mfgr enough to get an entire university town high at a rave. Also you're gonna use like $5 of filament to print up a shitty impression of a flask I can buy for $3.
The meta-point is this is a boring easy synthesis, equivalent to stir frying pepper steak once using a 3-d printed wok (yeah, that'll work well) and declaring yourself a Chinese chef.
The biggest problem with "make it at home" is most people have pretty magical thinking about chemistry. There are people out there who are smart enough not to, for example, shit into their homemade bread dough, admittedly not a high bar. But those same people will see "windex with ammonia alternative" or WTF its called and pour that in place of actual pharm-grade ammonia hydroxide solution, then wonder why their product is blue and foamy and makes people vomit and die. And somehow this will all be the fault of home or amateur chemistry as a hobby, not the mfgr being a moron.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 22 2018, @04:04PM
This is actually a reason why the printer/chemputer is a good idea (from a perspective of someone who wants to make chemical or drug products at home). It could make the process of chemistry somewhat more idiot-proof and allow dumb or distracted users to make more complicated chemicals/drugs at home. The point of failure becomes loading the starting chemicals into the machine, and running the right file/program. I guess dealing with your machine being broken would also become a major point of failure. You're not going to take your MDMA-spewing machine in to get fixed, and might not even notice when something goes wrong.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]