IMAGE: A slow process that Rice University chemists found could replace difficult money – based catalysis to create valuable fluoroketones, a forerunner in the design and manufacture of drugs. view more
Credit: Photo by Renee Man / @chemkitty
HOUSTON – (February 26, 2021) – Save your money! It is better to use it for jewelry than as a material for drugs.
Rice University scientists have developed a much simpler way to make fluoroketones, a precursor for the design and manufacture of drugs that typically require a silver catalyst.
Rice chemist Julian West and graduate students Yen-Chu Lu and Helen Jordan introduced a process for rapid and scalable synthesis of fluoroketones that has hitherto been challenging and expensive to perform.
Their open work covers the February 21 issue of the journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry ChemComm.
The new laboratory process replaces silver with cerium-based ammonium nitrate (CAN), which gives a pre-production under mild conditions in about 30 minutes.
“We could do batches of this in a bathtub,” West said.
Cerium has shown such potential in another laboratory, and the fact that it is 800 times more abundant in the Earth’s crust than silver has been of great interest to Rice’s team.
“Ketones are a gateway action group in molecules that you can use to make different things, such as anti-cancer fertilizers,” said West, who joined Rice in 2019 with funding from the Texas Institute for Cancer Prevention and Research and was named Forbes 30 Under-Player Game under 30 last year.
“They are a great step towards becoming an alkene or a fragrant ring,” he said. “An important part of this paper is that we incorporate fluorine into these fragments. an interesting and very abundant element, but hardly used in biology.
“Fluorine has some special properties: It’s incredibly electronegative, so it retains its electrons,” West said. “That makes it difficult for an enzyme in biological processes to deal with them in drugs such as anti-cancer molecules.”
Hydrogen atoms in drug molecules are easy for the liver to process, but fluorines in their place “resemble plasticizing weapons at that point,” he said. “That helps drugs last much longer in the body, so you don’t have to take as much. That’s desirable for chemotherapeutics.” He noted that atorvastatin ( aka Lipitor), one of the most common drugs in the United States, contains fluorine for the same reason.
“We want to put fluorine in specific places in the molecule where we know it will make a difference, and this ketone action group will allow us to do that,” West said. “People have been using a silver catapult, but the process requires a lot of money, takes a long time at high temperatures and has to be done under carefully controlled nitrogen or argon atmosphere.
“Our process is cheap bucket chemistry, and we think the reaction is done in about five minutes,” he said. “But we’ll leave it for 30, just to be safe.”
The process is very tedious. “When Yen-Chu took three times the original recipe, it got the same result,” West said. “That’s rare in these kinds of reactions.”
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A slow process that Rice University chemists found could replace difficult money – based catalysis to create valuable fluoroketones, a forerunner in the design and manufacture of drugs. (Credit: Photo by Renee Man / @chemkitty)
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CAPAL: Julian West. (Credit: Rice University)
Located on a 300-acre forest campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by US News & World Report. Rice has earned honors from the schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,978 undergraduates and 3,192 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is slightly lower than 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason Rice is ranked 1st for a lot of racial / class interactions and No. 1 for quality of life by Princeton Review. Rice is also considered the best value among private universities by Kiplinger Personal Finance.
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