Print your own medicine Lee Cronin

organic chemists make molecules very

complicated molecules by chopping up a

big molecule into small molecules and

get reverse engineering and as a chemist

one of the things I wanted to ask my

research group a couple of years ago is

could we make a really cool Universal

chemistry set in essence could we app

chemistry now what would this mean and

how would we do it well to start to do

this we took a 3d printer and we started

to print our beakers and our test tubes

on one side and then print the molecule

at the same time on the other side and

combine them together and what we call

reaction where and so by printing the

vessel and doing the chemistry at the

same time we may start to access this

Universal tool kit of chemistry now what

could this mean well if we can bed

biological and chemical networks like a

search engine so if you have a cell

that’s ill you need to cure or bacteria

that you want to kill if you have this

embedded in your device at the same time

and you do the chemistry you may be able

to make drugs in a new way so how are we

doing this in the lab will it require

software it requires hardware and it

requires chemical inks and so the really

cool bit is the idea is we want to have

a universal set of inks that we put out

with the printer and you download the

blueprint the organic chemistry for that

molecule and you make it in the device

and so you can make your molecule in the

printer using this software so what

could this mean well ultimately it could

mean that you can print your own

medicine and this is what we’re doing in

the lab at the moment but to take baby

steps to get there first of all we want

to look at drug design and production or

drug discovery and manufacturing because

if we can manufacture it after we

discovered it we could deploy it

anywhere you don’t need to go to the

chemist anymore we can print drugs at

point of need we can download new

Diagnostics say

new super bug is emerged you put it in

your search engine and you create the

drug to treat the threat so this allows

you on the fly molecular assembly but

perhaps for me the Corbett going into

the future is this idea of taking your

own stem cells with your jeans and your

environment and you print your own

personal medicine and if that doesn’t

seem fanciful enough where do you think

we’re going to go well you’re going to

have your own personal matter fabricator

beam me up Scotty