When synthesizing new drugs for pharmaceutical purposes, medicinal chemists will experience success or failure depending on differences as small as a single atom. The Levin Lab, an organic chemistry lab at UChicago led by associate professor Mark Levin, has found two strategies to replace a carbon atom with a nitrogen atom.
Acknowledging the difficulty of developing new drugs, Levin called synthetic chemistry a “multidimensional optimization problem.”
“[The drug] has to be efficacious, non-toxic, [and] absorbed in the gut in order to be in oral therapy,” he said.
Most drugs in development have some, but not all, of these requirements. Fortunately, the swapping of a carbon atom with a nitrogen atom radically increases the chance of meeting these parameters by allowing chemists to fine-tune many properties of chemical compounds.
The two papers align with the group’s culture with what Levin calls a “modality agnostic lab.” “We are more interested in ‘here’s the class of problem we want to solve’ and we’ll use whatever technique we believe to be appropriate,” Levin said.
The lab actively supports ideas that resonate with students. The projects carried out are largely inspired with the creative direction of its lab members.
From:Chicago Maroon
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