/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9832109
It is the only way

>>9832110
but nobody reads the papers anyways, and all the outcomes do is lead to methodologies to make new drugs that always turn out to just be delayed action poisons.

>>9832109
Just put one of these in the lab and pilot it remotely with a pair of oculus rift goggles and a kinect.

:D

https://youtu.be/vjSohj-Iclc

>>9832128
But it's necessary. How do you think antibiotics were discovered? by accident? OHhhh... WAIT!!... jeeez sorry OP, I've got some bad news for you...

>>9832222
all the good drugs are natural products or semisynthetics. It seems like all the shit developed using purely synthetic de novo methodology always just turns out to be poison 5 years later.

>>9832229
Thanks for explaining (and killing) the joke. Well done man

But its beautiful.

>>9832109
The chemists I've spoken to seem to actively enjoy making their working environment as dangerous as possible if it means getting to see cool colours or fire

>>9832229
Natural products isolation chemist here. Only 70% of drugs since the 80s are natural products/derived from natural products (at least that was the last number I've seen), and that percentage is getting smaller every year. De novo drugs and natty Ps have their own advantages over each other, and it's stupid to dismiss either

>>9832222
>Penicillin
>Synthetic

Get out.

>>9832109

To make omelettes you have to break a few eggs. Rational drug design is relatively safe and is responsible for most recent discoveries nowadays, but is basically tantamount to throwing random molecules at a target and seeing what sticks. Once you get something that looks promising and making educated guesses about the safety of its pharmacodynamics/kinetics, you test it on animals to see if they die/get side effects, and then hopefully humans. Sometimes animals die. Sometimes people get terrible side effects. Science moves on despite those setbacks.

Personally I enjoy inserting genes that code for enzymes that make naturally occurring drugs into e-coli and just providing them with starting products and glucose and then purifying the resulting slime. It's cheaper and I don't have to worry about expensive chemicals. Most starting products for these things are just amino acids anyways and the intermediate products are seldom harmful.

>>9832616
It just seems like there's a better chance of getting molecules that aren't toxic with natural products since they're often so much more complex, and likely, more specific.

what's it like being a natural products chemist? What do you end up spending most of your time doing? extraction? chromatography? spectroscopy?

>>9832565
so beautiful. That's part of the reason I'm here ;- )

>>9832616
>natty Ps

Very tempted to use that term the next time I give a powerpoint presentation to my research group desu

>>9832692
I mean it's hard to draw conclusions without looking up stats, but a lot of natural products are also toxic or non-specific. If anything, synthetic compounds are easier to produce analogues for (and it would be easier to assess the toxicity of metabolic degradation products and shit).

I feel like as a consumer/patient it shouldn't matter to you - by the time a drug gets to your hands it's been through so many tests that the bad ones have (mostly) been weeded out and I don't see why a synthetic compound would slip through the cracks better than a natural product. I DO get what you're saying, though - I've noticed a lot of medicinal chemistry has a fetish for flat aromatic molecules and those have less stereochemical information to bind with, which I'd imagine would decrease selectivity. The flatland thing probably makes manufacture and research insanely easier/faster too.

Your idea of natural products isolation is pretty much spot on, except I work with bacteria so I also do large scale fermentation and I also do all the bioassays myself so there's a lot of tissue culture work involved. By far the majority of my time is spent fucking around with the HPLC though.

Right now, getting time on the spectrometer is the limiting factor for me.

>>9832805
The sp2-sp2 cross coupling of flat aromatic heterocycles for the purposes of high-throughput screening thing is exactly what I was referring to. I suspect that this strategy is simply an efficient way of registering hits, but I doubt that it necessarily leads to good "medicines". It certainly doesn't seem as likely to produce drugs that have the same sort of complex, multi-receptor activity as famous, medically useful natural products do.

Besides my hate for chromatography, natural product drug discovery sounds like a really fun field. I spent the last few years getting really good at growing shrooms, doing strain isolation, etc., so I've actually developed decent petri dish work technique, and besides that, I have decent expertise in spectroscopy and synthetic chemistry. I always wanted to develop new inorganic reagents for synthetic chemistry, but I'm just starting to lose faith in the value of the main goal of that sort of research, which I guess could be broadly described as 'producing new tools for medicinal chemistry'.

>>9832653
You are an extremly retarded individual. Can't anyone see the irony on my joke?!!
OP said that most good medications are natural derivatives and not synthetic so to it chemist are not needed
I told him that he forgot about the importance of penicillin! OH WAIT it is not synthetic but natural! You are right OP chemist are not needed!! get it? you get it now?!

>>9832964
Ehh chromatography isn't really that bad. You get to play with all sorts of interesting resins, and it's also a very marketable skill.

You should consider it friend, it sounds like you might find it very gratifying. The field is moving towards more genomic approaches which I think is fascinating and I feel will only explode with the genome age.

Synthetic Chemist here... Most drugs are synthetic. "Natural product derived" is still synthetic and likely required extensive lab work to develop. Calling drugs 'delayed action poisons' is also somewhat silly, you could say that about any substance. Facts are that big pharma, love them or hate them, cures people.

I agree that the lab is too dangerous, which is why I got into the business side. We just throw a few Rajesh's and Xiong's in there and who really gives a fuck if they die at 55?

>>9833653
well, I'm signed up for a PhD that's very unrelated :- / but it's certainly something I could appreciate. The trouble for me is that my expertise is much more focused on inorganic/physical/quantum chem, and I sorta studied as little biology as possible. I really do find biology interesting, but I just never really liked studying it in the school environment.

>>9833693
you see? This is why I want to get away from your shitty industry.

>>9834063
What are you studying? Organometallics?

Why isn't most of it automated anyway ?

>>9834065
organometallics + computational. I sorta do both.
What I'm working on now is more considered coordination chem though since I'm not making M-C bonds.