“3D Printer” for Small Molecules
March 16th, 2015Via: HHMI News:
Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientists have simplified the chemical synthesis of small molecules, eliminating a major bottleneck that limits the exploration of a class of compounds offering tremendous potential for medicine and technology.
Scientists led by Martin Burke, an HHMI early career scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, used a single automated process to synthesize 14 distinct classes of small molecules from a common set of building blocks. Burke’s team envisions expanding the approach to enable the production of thousands of potentially useful molecules with a single machine, which they describe as a “3D printer” for small molecules. Their work is described in the March 13, 2015, issue of the journal Science.
According to Burke, the highly customized approach that chemists have long relied on to synthesize small molecules is time consuming and inaccessible to most researchers. “A lot of great medicines have not been discovered yet because of this synthesis bottleneck,” he says. With his new technology, Burke aims to change that. “The vision is that anybody could go to a website, pick the building blocks they want, instruct their assembly through the web, and the small molecules would get synthesized and shipped,” Burke says. “We’re not there yet, but we now have an actionable roadmap toward on-demand small-molecule synthesis for non-specialists.”
