It’s all about chemistry. From simple waste, a team of researchers managed to find a solution to manufacture drugs and agricultural chemicals.
How to turn waste into medicine?
Countless things we use in our modern societies, from food to food containers, depend on chemistry. If we thought that most waste is not useful, even in some cases dangerous or toxic, researchers have looked into the subject to go even further in circularity. An article published in Nature reports research into software programmed with a list of known and viable chemical reactions and a set of constraints limiting the use of toxic chemicals.
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Powered by a list of common chemical wastes, this software is able to determine wastes that can be used as raw materials for the production of medicines and agricultural chemicals. The authors of the article work for a company called Allchemy. The system developed by the researchers relies on a database of 10,000 potential reaction entries, each reaction entry contains product information. The data comes from a large number of government agencies.
A score helps refine the transformation process
Using this database, the researchers first worked on a group of 189 chemicals which are common garbage in 2022. Each of them has been tested in the software to understand its reaction. The molecules were subjected to analysis on numerous occasions. To keep things calculable, the team went through all the chemicals and eliminated anything that did not seem to be related to drugs and desired agricultural chemicals. The researchers point out that “This method created a large network of reactions that either achieved the desired chemical or produced something very similar”.
The researchers created a score for each potential reaction, which makes it possible to specify the extent to which the waste could be used to create a drug or an agricultural chemical. The score drops, for example, if a reaction involved a toxic solvent, extreme temperatures, or the production of large or complex waste. On the other hand, the score increases when the reactions do not require a change of solvent. The higher the score after this process, the more likely the reaction is to be used. In particular, it is possible to manufacture acetaminophen (an analgesic) from waste.