As absurd as it may sound to regular people, a ground-breaking molecule-making machine can do the job of a 3-D printer of chemistry. This machine has the ability of assembling incredibly intricate molecule structure on command.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reports that this has the possibility of leading to the development of new drugs and other technology which necessitates the employment of small molecules.
Burke, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist said “We wanted to take a very complex process, chemical synthesis, and make it simple. Simplicity enables automation, which, in turn, can broadly enable discovery and bring the substantial power of making molecules to non-specialists.”
It has been established in the past that small molecules are tremendously complex to create in laboratories and could take years to develop.
Burke said, “Up to now, the bottleneck has been synthesis. There are many areas where progress is being slowed, and many molecules that pharmaceutical companies aren’t even working on, because the barrier to synthesis is so high.”
The researchers needed to simplify these complex molecules so they have broken them down in much tinier building blocks which can be into round up into structures. A number of these blocks built in the lab are available commercially.
The research team worked out a “catch-and-release” method for the automation of these building blocks. This method piles one piece at a time and then washes away surplus elements before it adds the next one. 14 various variations of small molecules have been developed with the assistance of this machine, even the ones which were very tough to manufacture before.
Researchers are planning on employing this technology for researching on anti-fungal medications.
Burke said “It is expected that the technology will similarly create new opportunities in other therapeutic areas as well, as the industrialization of the technology will help refine and broaden its scope and scalability.”
“Perhaps most exciting, this work has opened up an actionable roadmap to a general and automated way to make most small molecules. If that goal can be realized, it will help shift the bottleneck from synthesis to function and bring the power of making small molecules to non-specialists,” he concluded.
