Cost-effective cancer therapies, courtesy Oxygen and Copper
Cancer drugs and treatments, more often than not, prove cost prohibitive, more so for needy patients. Now, thanks to a pathbreaking UCLA research, cancer treatment could become decisively cost-effective. Using a process called “aminodealkenylation, the team used oxygen as a reagent and copper as a catalyst to break the carbon-carbon bonds of many different organic molecules, and replaced these bonds with carbon-nitrogen bonds, thereby converting the molecules into derivatives of ammonia called amines.
Though they are widely used in pharma and agricultural sectors, their raw materials and reagents are often expensive, and production processes discernibly intricate. The UCLA team has produced key chemicals in a few steps, entailing a much lower cost compared to conventional methods that use pricey and precious metals like platinum, silver, gold and palladium, rhodium, ruthenium and iridium.
The feat is a game changer given the vastly improved cost, time and effort matrix. For instance, the team produced a economical anti-cancer drug called c-Jun N-terminal kinase inhibitor in a mere three chemical steps vis-à-vis the erstwhile 12 or 13 steps, as also quickly converted adenosine, a neurotransmitter and DNA building block costing less than 10 cents per gram into the amine N6-methyladenosine, which plays a key role in controlling gene expression in cellular, developmental and disease processes.
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