The method, developed through interdisciplinary research efforts in Denmark, promises to drastically reduce material volumes, energy and costs for pharmaceutical companies, according to the published article.
When searching for drugs, the industry will routinely scan more than 40,000 different molecules in an area smaller than the head of a pin, those involved said.
“Saving infinite amounts of time, energy, and labor would be crucial for any synthesis and evaluation of biologics,” explained PhD student Mette G. Malle, lead author and postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, USA.
They named the resulting study solution “single-particle combinatory lipid nanocontainer fusion based on DNA-mediated fusion,” abbreviated Sparcld.
The advance, according to the text, implies the integration of elements from normally quite distant disciplines: synthetic biochemistry, nanotechnology, DNA synthesis, combinatorial chemistry and even machine learning related to artificial intelligence.
“No element of our solution is entirely new, but they have never combined so perfectly,” said team leader Nikos Hatzakis, Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen.
Participants concluded several industry collaborations, but forgot to mention which companies can implement this powerful tool.
“We had to keep things private because we didn’t want to risk others posting something similar first,” Hatzakis said.
Therefore, we did not have discussions with pharmaceutical companies or with other scientists who could use the method in different applications, he added.
However, he described it as a safe bet for industry as well as the academic groups involved in long molecule synthesis.
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