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Wednesday 10 March 2010

What is Solid?

Solid - training module in solid phase chemistry

The restructuring of the European chemical industry towards the direction of the pharmaceutical industry calls for new working methods. When developing new drugs, institutes and the leading pharmaceutical research industry opt for new approaches. Though the yield of multi-stage syntheses is mostly small, only minute amounts of a substance are necessary for them due to more sophisticated methods of instrumental analysis. The classical organic synthesis using a glass flask, as still practised in today’s vocational training or university studies, is impractical. In many cases the yield of the last stage is so small, that it makes any further synthesis impossible. The money and effort put into years of research would then be wasted.

When synthesising drugs, the main focus is to optimise their effectiveness, to slightly modify a molecule’s structure that a fungus, algae or a natural protein create. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of varieties of a molecule have to be tested and synthesised regarding their effectiveness as a drug.

In research, synthesis has proved successful in small plastic reactors. The molecule to be modified is chemically bound to a powdered polymer resin and flooded with reagents. Once the reaction is completed, it is rinsed with solvents and then the next reagent can be immediately attached. This method is simple, clean and very effective, because it can be carried out simultaneously. In industrial research synthesis robots operate hundreds of the little reaction vessels. For practical training these robots could easily be replaced by carousels.

With solid the partnership will develop a new training module in solid phase chemistry to meet those new challenges and training needs.

Students should learn the basics of such syntheses in pilot schemes using proteins and peptides as examples. After and introduction to the effects of pharmaceuticals and the search for new drugs, the students could eliminate protecting groups from polymeric amino acids/ peptides in the laboratories. The bonds between amino acids/ peptide components and carrier resin are eliminated and the free amino acids, for example, are detected with modern methods like thin-film chromatography.

This pilot scheme points out that in the post-genome era there is not only a demand for molecular biologists and information scientists to develop tailor-made pharmaceuticals to fight diseases like Alzheimer and cancer. But it is mostly chemists with their experience and knowledge about numerous molecular structures that are able to say which modification of a molecular structure is promising.

To develop theoretical and practical modules for solid phase chemistry, it would be helpful to make use of an interactive learning platform. The basic idea of such E-teaching /E-learning projects is to express complex facts and ideas with the help of multimedia. This might include e.g. films, real and virtual experiments, three-dimensional molecular structures, simulations of a reaction progress, and interactive visualisation. The latter is especially stimulating because chemistry can thus be explored playfully and the connection between learner and objective is easily achieved. Also, a learning platform has the possibility to offer material for different levels as well as links to help differentiating between basic knowledge and special knowledge.

The core module will be available in English with explanatory material in German, Polish and Turkish
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