I'd be really really hesitant to DIY something like this. Chemistry tends to involve a lot of things you can accidentally poison yourself with. Without a team holding organic chemistry and pharmacology degrees, as well as the time and money to verify that each step did exactly what was expected, you're reasonably likely to hit a poisonous pitfall you didn't know about.
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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That's true, I'd be hesitant to be one of the beta testers too -- though I think the goal of a machine like this would be to allow people at home to synthesize already known medicines using well tested methods. So there would be a dedicated team of professionals creating the instructions that the machine follows. More like printing a book than trying to write your own.
Right, just go to a testosterone replacement therapy forum and look at the general confusion about very basics like figuring out weight-dependent dosages. I know it’s cool to poo poo experts, but if you can’t calculate a dilution series, you are likely to kill yourself.
"synthesize medicines" makes it sound like a device that can make multiple medicines, but although various medicines will use some of the same steps, they may not be the same order, and there is a lot of monitoring between steps to verify quality. For example, if you grow a GM bacterium to make medicine A - the drug itself may only be a small fraction less than 1% of the total suspension where the bacteria are growing (if you were perfectly successful with the culture). You might have to filter, freeze, or do some solvent extraction as a first step. Several steps later, you might have to add a chemical to react with the drug or with a byproduct to make it possible to separate. Later there might be another reaction to remove the chemical component you added (or some other piece of the drug molecule). I'm not saying every drug goes through 20 process steps, but some do.
Willow bark will give you salicylic acid in just a few steps - similar to aspirin, dry the bark, extract in alcohol for a week or more. This "tincture" could be evaporated to produce a more concentrated product. It is far from pure, however.
just from looking, I think it’s a lab reactor rather than a bioreactor, so does automated organic synthesis rather than using bacteria. I’d love to try that out with willow bark though, have you done it before?
No, no willow trees nearby, alas.
Their site seems down currently (it gives HTTP 504). Maybe it can be found on the Internet Archive, though.
The goal I agree with: readiness to make the essential medicines if they are inacessible. As for pharmacosynthesis - chemistry is hard. I would not treat myself with anything I homebrewed unless the need was immediate and great (e.g. "war or disaster has made medicine unavailable").
Speaking as someone who actually likes chemistry for fireworks and special effects, and has studied how to build DIY batteries, electrolysers and fuel cells. I get things wrong too often (in pharmacosynthesis, once in a hundred times is unacceptably often) and lack the analytical capacity to detect my mistakes.
As a basic safeguard: before making a medicine to treat oneself (because treating others would require even higher assurances), I believe one should make it a hundred times and check the product without consuming any. Then, when the routine has proven to be unfailing, maybe actually use the product.
100% agreed, however one of the promising aspects of bioreactors is that once you got a genetically modified organism to produce the compound you want, with a stable marker to select against, then you have a relatively stable production method that doesn't involve that much human error. Which is also why the pharmaceutical industry has been moving to such processes where possible.
I think this is still an emerging field with not too many people working in homebrew biohacking.
You can probably find some guidance for basic stuff like Aspirin in bio-chemics text books, but these are not done in a bioreactor.
In general even the industry is still moving to bioreactors and are keeping their methods mostly secret as far as I can tell (not very deep into the stuff to be honest).
IMHO, DIY medication would benefit from a blend of biology and organic chemistry. Plants, fungi and recombinant bacteria can produce plenty of complex organic molecules that are biologically active for free. Then harvesting, isolating, and doing final modifications would be much less difficult than producing medications from scratch.
People used to make poppy tonic as a pain killer, and poppies are easy to grow and process. Willow bark is a precursor to aspirin, but dosage can be really hard to figure out because there's so much variance in plant strength. Willow is especially dangerous because the LD50 of aspirin is one of the lowest (the lowest?) of modern medicines.
Psychedelics are excellent for treating depression, addiction, and PTSD. Marijuana has been claimed to fix everything but realistically it's a good sleep aid and can also help treat PTSD. Both of these are pretty easy to grow and may be legal depending on where you're at and if you have a prescription.
Ginger and marijuana both are good for treating nausea, and you should be able to grow ginger indoors in colder climates too.
St John's Wart is good for depression. Valerian is a sleep aid. Kava is also a sleep aid and good for anxiety.
There are a lot of indigenous medicines derived from plants (many of which were processed or synthesized in to the drugs you can be prescribed today). This would be a good place to start (while being a bit critical and realizing that you should also research efficacy outside of folk wisdom).
Just thinking about this in order of importance, what we really need are antibiotics. This is a lot harder to make. I know penicillin is just mold, but it's heavily refined and only good for a short time.
You can do a lot without a lab, but if you want to really get serious you need to make sure you're working with folks who have chemistry degrees because it can get really complicated and really dangerous really quickly.
Well if the pharmacy refuses to sell you a decongestant or is closed, you can make your own
https://maggiemcneill.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/synthesizing-pseudoephedrine-from-meth.pdf
Honestly, Chinese ephedra has pseudoephedrine in it, as w well as ephedrine which can function more effectively as a bronchodilator. Just don't take it if you're taking NDRI antidepressants.
Imagine what people could do with this if it were distilled into a working form: people in places where abortions and hormone therapies are punished could surpass the law, people disconnected from supply chains could acquire treatment for all sorts of disease. It makes me really hopeful about the future!
Anybody know any pharmacologists/engineers? I think these people need more folks onboard!