A World That is Safe

To drug Addicts: Imagine a world with drugs that are safe, and won't harm your human body. It is like a dream come true. 

Physics and Chemistry scholars from Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) have invented a new method which could speed up the drug discovery process and lead to the production of higher quality medicinal drugs which are purer and have no side effects. The technique, which is a world-first breakthrough, uses a specific nanomaterial layer to detect the target molecules in pharmaceuticals and pesticides in just five minutes.


The new HKBU invention can be applied to the drug discovery process, as well as the production and quality control stages of pharmaceutical manufacturing. It can also be used in environmental monitoring. The paper, which is entitled "Chiral Nanoparticle-Induced Enantioselective Amplification of Molecular Optical Activity," was published in the international journal Advanced Functional Materials (volume 29, issue 8, February 2019).

The team was jointly led by Associate Professor Dr Jeffery Huang Zhifeng and Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Lin Yang from the Department of Physics, and Associate Professor Dr Ken Leung Cham-fai and Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Kwan Chak-shing from the Department of Chemistry at HKBU.

Medicinal drugs and pesticides are composed of organic molecules. Normally each molecule has two "chiral" versions which are mirror images of each other in terms of absolute configuration. While otherwise identical, these "right-handed" and "left-handed" molecules can have totally different effects.

For example, anti-inflammatory drug naproxen of a particular type of chirality can treat arthritis pain while its mirror image twin can result in liver poisoning. As a result, selecting only useful chiral molecules during the drug discovery process can help produce pure drugs that can cure specific diseases with no adverse effects.

-Nathania Adora Cahyadi

Source:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190429095038.htm