New Molecular 3D Printer Can Create Billions of Compounds

ErnieKey writes: University of Illinois researchers have created a device, called a Molecular-Machine, which essentially manufactures on the molecular compound level. Martin Burke, the lead researcher on this project says that they are already able to synthesize over a billion different compounds with the machine, compounds which up until now have been very difficult to synthesize. The impact on the pharmaceutical industry could be staggering.

Comments

Replicator prototype

[king neckbeard]

Is this the beginning of what could become Star Trek-like replicators?

Re:Replicator prototype

[ColdWetDog]

Nope, it's much close to what Neil Stephenson describes in the 'Diamond Age' although calling it a 'printer' is a bit disingenuous. It looks like a complicated solid phase chemistry setup. And it only 'prints' four classes of simple molecules.

But it is interesting. It's not your father's organic chemistry any more.

Re:Replicator prototype

[RingDev]

If I am reading this correctly, no. It does not appear to have significant value at the production level. The cost per quantity is astronomical. But what it can be used for is rapid prototyping. Say you have an idea for a new doping agent for a photovoltaic cell. Previously, you would have to either manually concoct the agent, or you would have to design a production system to make it for you. Both of which are incredibly time and financially intensive, especially for something that is just a theory. This machine would allow you to "print" a small batch of your agent, enough to do a proof of concept so that you can determine if it is worth moving forward with a production system to produce it more efficiently.

-Rick

Re:Replicator prototype

[ShanghaiBill]

calling it a 'printer' is a bit disingenuous.

To be fair, the scientists did not call it a 'printer'. The journalist made that up in an effort to dumb down the story and wedge it into a column on 3D printing.

Re:Replicator prototype

[dlkwnt]

Meh, wake me up when I can print out a chicken sandwich, a pillow, and a couple hits of LSD...

Re:Replicator prototype

[kheldan]

Possibly. Also, it would be nice if it was the beginning of the end for over-priced pharmaceuticals.

Re:Replicator prototype

[Catbeller]

It will happen, and soon. The journalist understands this. So, it is a printer. You are persnickity to the point of blocking the realization - chemical printers will happen, and it is part and parcel of the 3D printing flaming freakout that will shortly commence. They will have to shut this down HARD, to keep us from manufacturing pharmaceuticals and recreational drugs wihout the permission of IP "owners" or our frankly insane drug law enforcers.

Not 3D chemical printing

[cruff]

From the description in the articles, it appears to function more like a DNA assembly. They start with some basic building blocks with certain chemical groups attached, and react them together to build molecules, freeing those attached groups. It does not appear to be adding individual atoms to individual molecules.

Re:Not 3D chemical printing

[Catbeller]

But it is going there. Nothing can stop it. Ways will be found. Give it ten years. First industrial scale, then expensive professional machines, then someone cracks the manufacturing code, as it were, and we're off to the make-your-own-cocaine-and-rogaine races.

Re:Not 3D chemical printing

[reverseengineer]

Yes, it's a lot like existing solid-state nucleic acid or peptide synthesis setups, but with the major advantage of forming carbon-carbon bonds instead of phosphodiester or amide linkages, making the technique a lot more general. The setup involves a useful reaction called Suzuki coupling. In Suzuki coupling, a metal (usually palladium) catalyzes a reaction between a halide (that is to say, chlorine, bromine, etc.) and an organoboron compound. The mechanism is complex, but the result is a carbon-carbon single bond. This reaction and similar ones are already widely used in the pharmaceutical industry since they can reliably glue together smaller structures together to make a larger molecule. The smaller structures are not individual atoms, though- they tend to have maybe 10-20 atoms or so. Drugs with biaryl structures like the blood pressure drug valsartan are now often made this way.

In previous work, the Burke lab showed that the reaction could be made more convenient by using a specific type of boronate salt which can be easily added and removed from a molecule, and generally produces derivatives that are stable long-term. They then found that these salts can bind to silica and will only be released in the presence of the solvent tetrahydrofuran. So what they did was build a setup that can run this reaction iteratively; at each step, you add another bit of the molecule; each bit has a halide at one end and a boronate salt at the other. This is a lot like an amino acid, which has an amine at one end and a carboxylic acid at the other, which can each react with other amino acids to form chains. Since the molecule bits are shelf-stable, conceivably you could load a machine with a library of commonly used "puzzle pieces" (which you probably bought from a specialty chemicals manufacturer like Sigma-Aldrich or EMD) and assemble them, then wash off the finished product in THF. The yields demonstrated thus far are...not great, but the idea that it can run automated means that it could brute-force some syntheses and allow for the production of complex molecules from more common starting materials. It's a major advance in synthetic organic chemistry, but it's not so much a universal printer as more like an early mechanical printing press, where you still need to provide the type blocks and set the letters yourself.

Re:Not 3D chemical printing

[iluvcapra]

Give it ten years.

Molecular printers, flying cars and fuel-cell smartphones...

Fixed

[neminem]

"The impact on the pharmaceutical^Hrecreational drug industry could be staggering."

Yes, I would like to 3d print some lsd, please? :D

(Note to any snoopy snitches who might happen to see that I posted this non-anonymously: I don't mean I *personally* have any intention of wanting to 3d print any currently-illegal recreational compounds... not at all. Nope.)

Re:Diamonds?

[ShanghaiBill]

Diamonds are carbon-based, but can they be 3D-Printed ?

With a combination of CVD and deposition masks, it may be possible to someday 'print' diamonds in complex 3D shapes. We can already do this with silicon, which is chemically closest to carbon. Most silicon photolithography is subtractive, but it can also be additive.

The impact on the pharmaceutical industry

[fustakrakich]

Let's hope it's devastating. Anything that could loosen their stranglehold on medicine can only be seen as a good thing. But like the writers guilds back in the day, they will probably try to have the molecular printing press banned.

Re:The impact on the pharmaceutical industry

[ColdWetDog]

There ya go. The costs for many drugs could plummet if access to manufacture were made more easy.

Most drugs ARE easy to manufacture. That's what the generic manufacturers do for a living. It's hard to design and test them. It's hard to ensure purity. It's hard to crunch through the legal and bureaucratic wastelands that surround design, testing and manufacturing.

The bulk organic chemistry is actually pretty straightforward.

Re:The impact on the pharmaceutical industry

[fustakrakich]

If they didn't do it somebody else would, that would include using the government itself to produce and compete in the market. We don't need big business to corrupt the government to get the things we need.

Re:Growing Diamonds

[ArcadeMan]

When your wife wants a diamond she also generates a fairly obscene amount of pressure on your budget.

A coming nightmare for our owners

[Catbeller]

This is the beginning, of course.
Imagine the fainting freakout when they realize that we (if we were allowed to have a printer) make any drug we like. Or explosive. Or ammunition. Or laser components.
Don't bother imagining what the world's imaginary property "owners" will immediately demand - and receive - in the way of DRM and strict drone-and-goon raids on anyone who dares make an object they "own".
And further imagine the flaming worldwide war against printers when they realize we will be able to make electronic and photonic computers and comm systems that don't have their cute back doors built in from the factory or installed at the intercept point they use to infiltrate routers and other computing devices.
Phones: tracked. Computers: pwned. Unauthorized software and video/audio recordings will shortly become drone-and-goon felonies on every corner of the planet, as soon as Obama fast tracks the treaty. How about a raise of hands for those of you who understand that owning a chemical printer, much less an product printer, without real-time monitoring by entities outside our control will be likewise a drone-and-goon felony.

Funniest Sentence in Months

[ralphsiegler]

" For those of you who are not chemists, small molecules are organic compounds with very low molecular weight of less than 900 daltons. " Now that is a funny sentence.

Drug costs and the potential here

[fyngyrz]

Unfortunately, the cost of the vast majority of pharmaceuticals is hardly related at all to the cost of the ingredients.

It's the R and D, the testing, the approvals, the red tape and paperwork, the patents, the lawyers, the lawsuits, other stuff along those lines, and of course the requirement to make a profit.

What this has the potential to bring in is a time where prototyping a drug from theoretical compound-might-do-this to have-compound-will-test is a practical reality.

Much drug generation is truly blind -- essentially, find a compound (rain forest, sea creature, etc.) and try it on a bunch of problems, see what happens. This could benefit a different approach, one that requires more up-front understanding and insight into what problem X might respond to. You could also use it with a shotgun approach, but with billions of possibilities (and probably more, later), it seems like one "shotgun" blast would require so much testing as to be wholly impractical.

Re:Drug costs and the potential here

[towermac]

There is still the notion that: A known compound that other people have already taken...

So, some notion of safety.

Re:Growing Diamonds

[ShanghaiBill]

I thought growing diamonds required a fairly obscene amount of pressure?

No. Natural diamonds form that way, and in the past HPHT (high pressure, high temp) methods were used to manufacture low grade diamonds for use as abrasives. But today, most diamonds are manufactured using CVD, with operates in near vacuum. CVD is cheaper, produces better quality diamonds, and can work with odd geometries. It can also be used to put a diamond layer on an existing substrate. But we still don't have diamond coated frying pans.

Re:Growing Diamonds

[vivian]

I think the lack of diamond coated frying pans is more because diamonds actually aren't forever, and the first time you burned your pan, your expensive nano diamond coating would sublime off into carbon dioxide.