The prescription drug underneath that childproof cap is often the culmination of myriad complex chemical reactions choreographed in huge industrial facilities on several continents, across many months of time. The future, however, could look very different.
Patients could, one day, potentially obtain pills from a machine that is able to take raw materials and synthesize them into drugs in a matter of hours. What’s more, the products would not be one size fits all but a drug dose calibrated to each person’s needs based on factors like age, body weight and genetic variations that affect how one metabolizes and clears the drug as well as takes into account potential interactions with other medicines.
Now a team of chemical engineers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has worked out production methods in one continuously flowing process from start to finish rather than the stops and starts of producing chemical components in batches, often at different locations. They hacked off the shelf equipment and developed new pumps, motors, heating elements and ultrasound to move particles around, creating a drug-producing process that is not only faster but also more precise, more efficient and cheaper than production methods now in use. Their work is detailed in this week’s Science.
The current version is a modular system where various elements of raw materials and sets of specialised reactors and processors can be plugged in to different sections of the assembly. “This theme of reconfigurable unit operations is a real landmark,” says Tyler McQuade, programme manager with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s chief sponsor of technological wizardry and innovation, which funded the development. Similarly, John Lewin, a pharmacist at Johns Hopkins University and a consultant to DARPA, who was not involved with the study but reviewed the work, calls it simply, “A paradigm shift in the way pharmaceuticals are made.”
Even at this early stage of development the synthesizer is able to produce four very different classes of drugs: generic versions of the antihistamine Benadryl, antianxiety drug Valium, antidepressant Prozac and lidocaine, a local anesthetic. At this point, the system is more than a proof-of-concept demonstration but not quite a prototype that is ready to go into production; there is still some tinkering to be done to expand its capacity to crank out different classes of drugs and wring out more efficiencies in the processes. “In many cases there was no precedent for doing the chemistry in a continuous system, we had to develop new chemistry to accomplish that,” says Timothy Jamison, one of the senior scientists on the M.I.T. project. They devised ways for more rapid and efficient heat transfer, a critical aspect of chemical reactions, “so you have much more precise temperature control in a reaction” than with traditional processes.
