A new tool speeds up development of vaccines and other pharmaceutical products by more than 1 million times while minimizing costsIn search of pharmaceutical agents such as new vaccines, industry will routinely scan thousands of related candidate molecules. A novel technique allows this to take place on the nano scale, minimizing use of materials and energy. The work is published in the journal Nature Chemistry. More than 40,000 molecules can be synthesized and analyzed within an area smaller than a pinhead. The method, developed through a highly interdisciplinary research effort in Denmark, promises to drastically reduce the amounts of material, energy, and economic cost for pharmaceutical companies.
The work has been carried out in collaboration between the Hatzakis Group, University of Copenhagen, and Associate Professor Stefan Vogel, University of Southern Denmark. The project has been supported by a Villum Foundation Center of Excellence grant. The resulting solution is named "single particle combinatorial lipidic nanocontainer fusion based on DNA mediated fusion"—abbreviated SPARCLD.
The breakthrough involves integration of elements from normally quite distant disciplines: synthetic biochemistry, nanotechnology, DNA synthesis, combinational chemistry, and even Machine Learning, which is an AI (artificial intelligence) discipline.
The method works by using soap-like bubbles as nano-containers. With DNA nanotechnology, multiple ingredients can be mixed within the containers.
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-million-faster-dna-nanotechnology-pharmaceutical.html
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