Bath experts make drug breakthrough previously assumed impossible
The discovery by a team from the University of Bath could revolutionise how drugs are made
A discovery made by chemistry experts from the University of Bath could soon revolutionise how drugs are made.
The current system for creating pharmaceutical drugs creates on average 100 kilograms of waste for every 1kg of drug made, but the team from Bath has worked out how to do it and leave almost none.
We have spoken to doctor Alex Cresswell from the team and asked him how significant the development is.
"They (pharmaceutical companies) are pretty excited by it," he told us.
"I've been invited to give talks in several different countries, in the US and Europe, to talk about this process, so it is generating some excitement for certain in the pharmaceutical industry."
At the moment the process used to create drugs involves several steps, with toxic waste that is difficult to dispose of, created at each step along the way.
The new method developed in Bath uses blue light as a catalyst to speed up the reaction, meaning only one step is needed.
Fewer steps means less energy is used and "dramatically cuts down the waste created" according to a press release put out by the university.
The method was tested by synthesising a drug used for multiple sclerosis (MS), Fingolimod (brand name Gilenya), which is made by Novartis and had worldwide sales of $3 billion in 2020.
"What happens is the light passes on its energy to a catalyst in the reaction," Dr Cresswell said.
"Then that catalyst, once it's excited by the light, is then able to perform this chemical transformation that many chemists previously assumed was impossible."
Dr Cresswell added that the answer has "eluded chemists for many years".
“People don’t really think about the pharmaceutical industry when it comes to carbon emissions, but some studies have calculated that big pharma emits more than the automotive industry," he said.
“We’re really excited that our group is the first in the world to achieve this breakthrough, and hope that it could in the future lead to much more sustainable pharmaceutical manufacturing processes."
The method is not likely to be adopted by pharmaceutical companies for bulk manufacture straight away, but Dr Cresswell's team hopes it can be used to help discover and develop new drugs, by making it easier to synthesise chemical structures for testing.
Dr Cresswell said: “Building new molecules during the drug discovery process requires reactions that make it simple to ‘click’ atoms together in the required way, a bit like building models out of Lego.
“The aim is to make thousands of different derivatives for biological testing, and our new process gives chemists a way to connect certain atoms that simply wasn’t available before. This should help to speed up the discovery process.”
That said, the team is now collaborating with several pharmaceutical companies to scale up the process.