‘Tour de force’ by Chinese chemists could overturn high cost of drug treatments

Scientists in China have solved a 140-year-old chemistry problem in a breakthrough that could overturn traditional production methods and slash the cost of cancer treatments and other expensive medicinal compounds.

The research was co-led by Zhang Xiaheng, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, and Xue Xiaosong, a professor with the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, and published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

In his review of the paper, Scott Bagley, a senior principal scientist at Pfizer, described it as a “tour de force”, while some within China’s chemical research community are rating the team’s feat as “Nobel Prize level”.

The researchers proposed a straightforward alternative to the expensive, complex and dangerous method used by the chemical industry for more than a century to synthesise drugs and pesticides from a class of organic compounds called amines.

According to the paper, the team’s approach overcomes the many issues that have plagued the classical method – including the risk of explosions – and holds promise for making the production of important chemicals safer and more affordable.

“Overall, the authors have delivered a true tour de force here, not just developing the method but doing extensive scope, in-depth mechanistic studies and synthetic applications that clearly demonstrate the capabilities of this chemistry to be useful in many contexts,” Bagley said.

South China Morning Post