My son takes Focalin XR for his ADHD. It works great, but today at the pharmacy I started thinking where do the chemical compounds in this come from? Like I’m sure my pharmacy buys from a compound pharmacy. But where does the compound pharmacy by the methyl and phenyl from?
And how are these extracted from their sources? Is it mined? Does it come from corn? Animals?
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This is called organic synthesis, and has been around for 200-300 years or so. Scientists have learned to take small, accessible molecules from their surroundings and mix them together with other molecules to make larger, more complex structures. Some compounds require 10 or even more separate steps to piece together from smaller pieces. Petrochemical processing is a rich source of starting materials, as are plants.
So as a synthetic organic chemist, you’re trained to take small pieces and put them together to make one large piece with the structure that you need (structure often determines function). Chemists are constantly coming up with new ways / methods to link pieces together. Other chemists predict the structure of what could be a possible drug, using a lot of computer modeling. Synthetic chemists then make it and test it.
It’s all a game of Legos
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