A better way to create compounds for pharmaceuticals, other chemicals


Date:
May 3, 2022
Source:
Ohio State University
Summary:
What do gunpowder, penicillin and Teflon all have in common? They
were inventions that took the world by storm, but they were all
created by complete accident.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
What do gunpowder, penicillin and Teflon all have in common? They were inventions that took the world by storm, but they were all created by
complete accident.


==========================================================================
In a new study published in the journalScience,researchers used
electricity to develop a tool that may make it easier and cheaper to
fabricate the compounds used in pharmaceuticals and other natural
products. Yet this invention, too, joins the ranks of the many
unanticipated innovations that came before it.

Christo Sevov, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of
chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University, was part of a
team that initially sought to prepare a catalyst that could be activated
by electricity to make the bonds of the targeted drug compounds.

Their study's findings suggest a general guideline for taking inexpensive
and widely abundant materials, and using them to create complex compounds
that wouldn't normally work together. Streamlining this chemical process
could allow researchers to safely create more valuable products with
fewer steps and less waste.

But to actually facilitate their chemical reactions in the lab, instead
of using high-energy reagents, or added substances, as is customary when synthesizing materials, Sevov's team utilized the power of electricity.

Because electricity is ecologically sustainable, there's recently been a
push in the industrial sector to move toward the use of electrochemistry
to foster chemical change.



========================================================================== "It's a very attractive way to do chemistry these days, because we have
total control over how we run these reactions," Sevov said.

The research has broad applications in medicine, and in the creation of products like agrichemicals (like pesticides or herbicides) and certain plastics. But Sevov's discovery, while seemingly serendipitous, took
lots of hard work and patience to get right.

"It took maybe three months of testing different combinations of
additives, until all of a sudden something worked and it worked
phenomenally well," Sevov said. "Getting to that complex allowed us to
stitch together materials that are very difficult to stitch together under normal circumstances." Because the precious metals many chemists use
as catalysts can cost a pretty penny, Sevov's team chose a nickel atom
as the catalyst for their tool. In chemistry, catalysts are responsible
for increasing or decreasing the rate of the chemical reaction as they
make and create bonds.

"Being able to use catalysts that are very inexpensive, like nickel,
is very beneficial to everyone in the entire community in general,"
he said. Besides being a cheap alternative for businesses that produce pharmaceuticals, plastics and polymers, using nickel also keeps the cost
of food products down. For example, if farmers had to pay more for the agrichemicals these chemical reactions help create, the price of their
crop would rise proportionally, Sevov said.

To build on their research further, the team will go on to collaborate
with Merck, a multinational pharmaceutical company, to try creating other products using more difficult reactions and more complex molecules. But
with their latest discovery, Sevov said that he's optimistic that their
work will start to create brand new avenues in the field of chemistry.

"We're going to take advantage of this really reactive intermediate and
see how far we can run with it," Sevov said.

Co-authors include Taylor Hamby and Matthew Lalama of Ohio State. This
research was supported by the National Institutes of Health.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Ohio_State_University. Original
written by Tatyana Woodall. Note: Content may be edited for style
and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Taylor B. Hamby, Matthew J. LaLama, Christo S. Sevov. Controlling Ni
redox states by dynamic ligand exchange for electroreductive
Csp3-Csp2 coupling. Science, 2022; 376 (6591): 410 DOI:
10.1126/science.abo0039 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220503091554.htm

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