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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: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday January 22 2018, @11:59AM
LSD [wikipedia.org] is a good test case for a chemputer [theguardian.com]. It's one of the safest recreational drugs in existence. The effective dose is measured in micrograms (with single-digit milligrams being more than enough to go fully cosmic). A single chemist can make millions of doses of LSD, but good luck distributing that to people who want it. If a "drug printer" or "chemputer" device typically has very low yields compared to traditional drug synthesis methods, it's still likely to be able to produce enough acid for one person, or even a ballroom of people. And it could do so without the user needing any chemical knowledge (or just very little and basic attention to the operating parameters and cleanliness of the device), while avoiding human mistakes that hurt yield or add unwanted byproducts.
It seems very likely that "incumbents" or the U.S. government will throw some roadblocks in the way to stop such a device from gaining traction. But if the device is cheap and simple enough, the roadblocks won't do much. If someone starts selling a $5,000 chemputer, they could be able to move a lot of them before the DoJ can find the legal reasoning to shut them down. They could also avoid being shut down by not shipping the device with presets/software that allow it to create recreational drugs right out of the box. They can let others do that for them, or upload files/software onto random sites or the dark web themselves. They can offer general yet extremely specific and helpful technical support on various forums without needing to link to the necessary files/software.
You could compare the above scenario to Cody Wilson's Defense Distributed activities [soylentnews.org], which have spawned countless headlines and some DoJ heat yet have not landed him in jail. Or Josiah Zayner's company The Odin [soylentnews.org], which sells CRISPR experimentation kits.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]