Reverse Chemistry?

[ljube_02]

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Hey if you have on hand a drug such as aspirin or amphethetamine, etc, is it hard to take it apart and find out its formula? If so how would you try to accomplish such a task?

Is there a branch of science that deals with such reverse formulas, i.e. biochemistry or what?

Are formulas for drugs such as aspirin publicly available (i'd assume they were if it were possible to reverse engineer)?

 

[Random Access]

Originally posted by ljube_02
Hey if you have on hand a drug such as aspirin or amphethetamine, etc, is it hard to take it apart and find out its formula? If so how would you try to accomplish such a task?

Is there a branch of science that deals with such reverse formulas, i.e. biochemistry or what?

Are formulas for drugs such as aspirin publicly available (i'd assume they were if it were possible to reverse engineer)?

Trying to make your own drugs?

Dude, we made aspirin in orgo lab. It's a quite available formula. Don't most people do that in orgo lab? You're picking rather easy drugs to manufacture.

 

[ljube_02]

Im not trying to make drugs, just want to learn more about the field, i.e. do chemists make these things, etc.

So you made aspirin by breaking the aspirin tablet into parts and figuring out its formula? What exactly was involved in the process?

Also if all these formulas are publicly available (or easy to derive), then how do drug companies keep their business?
Thanks

 

[ljube_02]

Hey what line of work would be in someone coming up with pills for penis enlargement or making people forget what they did the day before?

 

[BrainDrain]

Originally posted by ljube_02

So you made aspirin by breaking the aspirin tablet into parts and figuring out its formula? What exactly was involved in the process?

Why would you make aspirin by breaking aspirin tablets?
If the compound already exists, then its formula can be found in Merck. In our orgo lab, we made aspirin (ASA) by acetylating salicylic acid with acetic anhydride.

 

[Cerberus]

aspirin is easy to make it just consists of salicylic acid and acetic anhydride. The combination of the two creates acetylsalicyclic acid (aspirin) and acetic acid


geek

 

[Aptamer]

Medicinal chemistry would be the field you would want to look in because it focuses on the chemical and biochemical reasoning for the design and development of drugs.

 

[samenewme]

Taking a compound and finding out what it's made of is part of the field of analytical chemistry. Spectrographic analysis is one of the tools used.

 

[maoeris]

I believe toxicologists do the sam thing, especialy if a drug overdose is to blame they need to be able to figure out what drugs componants a person may have. Also biochemists may do this also. There is something called HPLC that is a technique to figure out specific componants of a compound. Such as what exactly is is our CSF. These might be areas that you are interested in.

 

[Ramoray]

I actually had to do this for my ochem lab, we had to pick a drug and write on all its uses and how to make it from commerically available stuff, and there was EVERY drug on there. My T.A was telling me after he graded all of them that he now knew how to make any freakin drug out there, with all easily available stuff, so ya.. um done

 

[ramonmcguire]

In my lab for Orgo I, we had to take an unknown compound and perform tests and analysis on it and then identify it and write a report on how we determined what it was, give its physical and chemical characteristics etc. It took the whole semester to do.

 

[Ramoray]

God no ****, for orgo 1 and 2 we had like 6 weeks of unknowns, god that is hell.. derivatives, and analysis and spec. YIKES.. GLAD that is over.. i suck in lab tecnique, my contamination factor was so extreme i am shocked i even came close to identifying my cmpds

 

[deleted9493]

Yeah, spectroscopic analysis is huge nowadays for much identifcation. With carbon/proton NMR, mass spec. and IR....most unknown compounds are able to be positively identified by a chemist.
Medicinal chemistry is the sublet of chemistry that involves developing drugs that in many cases turn out simply to be modified forms of previously discovered/used compounds. Certainly medicinal chemistry has a pharmacological basis...which makes it both interesting and potentially rewarding.
Chemweb seems like it would be a good place to look for stuff that has piqued your interest....check it out.

 

[conure]

There are ways to find out the molecular formulas and molecular weights that I learned in General Chem. But I have conveniently forgotten most of it.

Use osmotic pressure to determine molecular weight. This works best with large molecules, but there are probably ways to do it with smaller ones too. I think using combustion techniques with a calorimeter you can determine the emperical formula. Using these two things you can figure out the molecular formula.

Spectroscopy tells you how its put together.

 

[Gleevec]

Most people use Mass-Spec, IR, NMR.

Its not really reverse chemistry, just analytical analysis.

 

[heelshmeel]

Originally posted by Gleevec
Most people use Mass-Spec, IR, NMR.

Its not really reverse chemistry, just analytical analysis.

this type of 'reverse chemistry' is the total realm of analytical chem. you can do what gleevec has mentioned here or you also have a whole array of web databases... (chemfinder.com comes to mind... also a wide variety of web journals , ACS, such as the j. of the am. chem soc.)

otherwise, for us premeds... I'd like to focus on the MS, IR, or NMR (or even light scattering)

 

[Random Access]

Do patent applications have the formulas of drugs?

 

[ljube_02]

Thank you all for the help!

 

[YaFwiendToluene]

Yea, you can do...NMR(Carbon 13 and Hydrogen) gives good backbone structure information...Infrared gives good functional group info..eh, I don't mess around with mass spec too much....But..those are some common ones. If you are interested in protein structure elucidation, they use things such as Xray, not sure how helpful NMR is...lol..a protien is HUGE...but for amino acids..yea...they can use NMR...thats about it. The main branch of chemistry that usually deals with this is the Organic Chemistry.

Cya.