Enzymes in the liver break down pharmaceutical drugs into metabolites that are water soluble, allowing the body to more easily excrete them after consuming them. The resulting metabolites may occasionally have strong effects that can be positive or negative.
The only way for medicinal chemists to test drug candidates for these potential effects is to use a lot of the metabolites that they produce” from scratch” over the course of several drawn-out chemical reactions, which takes lots of time, effort, and resources.
A research team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign led by M. Christina White, the William H. and Janet G. Lycan Professor of Chemistry, graduate students Rachel Chambers and Jake Weaver, and visiting scholar Jinho Kim has now worked with researchers at Merck & amp, Co. to create a quick and effective method of producing significant amounts of metabolites directly from