A better way of making the medicine go down

PHIL REID/The Dominion Post

ALCHEMY AT WORK: Emma Dangerfield has created a greener process of developing designer drugs using non-toxic chemicals.

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Developing drugs to treat disease can involve using a host of chemicals, but researcher Emma Dangerfield has found greener ways.

For the past two years, Mrs Dangerfield, 25, of Wellington, has been trying to make drug molecules in ways that use fewer resources and create less waste than is generated in traditional methods.

Carrying out the work as part of a joint project between Victoria University and the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research, she has found a way to make the molecules used to treat diseases such as diabetes, cancer and HIV more quickly and efficiently.

For patients, this could mean cheaper, more widely available drugs. But Mrs Dangerfield will first have to get a pharmaceutical company to commit to developing the molecules on a large scale.

She has patented her formula, in which the drug molecules are made in five to eight steps, roughly halving the traditional process. It involves using solvents such as water and ethanol instead of petrol, and rethinking the order of steps used to make the molecule to result in less waste.

Victoria University lecturer Mattie Timmer said some drugs produced toxic by-products during their development process.

Using Mrs Dangerfield's method would make it quicker and easier for drugs to be purified and made ready for consumption. "By using non-toxic chemicals you get a drug that needs less purification to meet the standards."

Malaghan research group leader Bridget Stocker said green chemistry was a developing field of research in California and Germany, but was difficult and required creativity. Green methods could enable chemists to produce large quantities of substances very quickly, which could then lead to the faster discovery of more drugs.

"A lot of drug discovery can be hit and miss, so it's good to make a lot of things quickly."

Mrs Dangerfield, whose method has been published in the journal Organic Letters, said she hoped the concept would be used in university curriculums as well as in drug manufacture.

- © Fairfax NZ News