Chemists synthesize an improved building block for medicines

Chemists overcome a major hurdle in synthesizing a more stable form of heterocycle—a common component of most modern pharmaceuticals

08-Jul-2024 - Chemists have overcome a major hurdle in synthesizing a more stable form of heterocycle—a family of organic compounds that are a common component of most modern pharmaceuticals. The research, which could expand the toolkit available to drug developers in improving the safety profiles of ...

New technology offers fast peptide synthesis

02-Mar-2017 - Manufacturing small proteins known as peptides is usually very time-consuming, which has slowed development of new peptide drugs for diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and bacterial infections. To help speed up the manufacturing process, MIT researchers have designed a machine that can rapidly ...

Automating DNA origami opens door to many new uses

31-May-2016 - Researchers can build complex, nanometer-scale structures of almost any shape and form, using strands of DNA. But these particles must be designed by hand, in a complex and laborious process. This has limited the technique, known as DNA origami, to just a small group of experts in the field. Now ...

DNA supply chain

Chemists discover how a single enzyme maintains a cell's pool of DNA building blocks.

14-Jan-2016 - Cell survival depends on having a plentiful and balanced pool of the four chemical building blocks that make up DNA -- the deoxyribonucleosides. However, if too many of these components pile up, or if their usual ratio is disrupted, that can be deadly for the cell. A new study from MIT chemists ...

Targeting cancer with a triple threat

MIT chemists design nanoparticles that can deliver three cancer drugs at a time

17-Apr-2014 - Delivering chemotherapy drugs in nanoparticle form could help reduce side effects by targeting the drugs directly to the tumors. In recent years, scientists have developed nanoparticles that deliver one or two chemotherapy drugs, but it has been difficult to design particles that can carry any ...

Fast synthesis could boost drug development

20-Mar-2014 - Small protein fragments, also called peptides, are promising as drugs because they can be designed for very specific functions inside living cells. Insulin and the HIV drug Fuzeon are some of the earliest successful examples, and peptide drugs are expected to become a $25 billion market by ...

MIT researchers create new self-assembling photovoltaic technology that repairs itself

08-Sep-2010 - Plants are good at doing what scientists and engineers have been struggling to do for decades: converting sunlight into stored energy, and doing so reliably day after day, year after year. Now some MIT scientists have succeeded in mimicking a key aspect of that process. One of the problems with ...

Biogenetically inspired approach to alkaloid family

20-Aug-2010 - An entire family of marine alkaloids that show potent anticancer activity and potential for treating Alzheimer’s disease has been synthesised by US chemists. Mohammad Movassaghi and colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, were intrigued by the molecular architecture of ...

MIT researchers harness viruses to split water

Crucial step toward turning water into hydrogen fuel

13-Apr-2010 - A team of MIT researchers has found a novel way to mimic the process by which plants use the power of sunlight to split water and make chemical fuel to power their growth. In this case, the team used a modified virus as a kind of biological scaffold that can assemble the nanoscale components ...

New chemical synthesis could streamline drug design

New method gives drug designers more flexibility

17-Aug-2009 - A team of MIT chemists has devised a new way to add fluorine to a variety of compounds used in many drugs and agricultural chemicals, an advance that could offer more flexibility and potential cost-savings in designing new drugs. Drug developers commonly add fluorine atoms to drugs, such as the ...