Inflammations have never been easier to treat!

You may have heard of Nurofen, a very common medicine used to treat pain and swelling, or aspirin, which does help relieve pain but it’s not nearly as reliable as Nurofen for this purpose. They are a part of our lives, and many of us take them for granted, without knowing how they are made. The problem with these kinds of medicine, called anti-inflammatories, is they require very specific conditions in order to be produced and, as a result, could make them rather rare to find in some pharmacies. However, this is about to change for the better.

Would you believe a bunch of researchers have discovered a much more effective way to make treatments for inflammations? You might not know it, but anti-inflammatory medicine used to be made through very limited means. However, this has just changed recently: chemists will finally be able to relax and not have to worry their reaction won’t work (at least for this domain).

Lots of experiments have been done and lots of materials have been used in order to achieve this result. So much has been used that half of the researchers’ article solely lists every material and its composition. This alone should say something about how much effort and time the researchers had to put into this extensive experiment.

It’s like going to the store, trying every t-shirt available until you find the perfect one for you and buying lots of them afterwards. These 3 steps apply for these researchers’ experiments as well: 1) trying out every possible combination of reactants 2) finding the ideal conditions 3) receiving the largest quantity of product thanks to those conditions.

This is exactly why their methods are applicable to almost any kind of this so called “pyridine”, which is the main component of the product. This compound might seem like a big deal (and it is in general) but it’s probably a good idea to give a bit more information on what it actually is and some other uses.

As you can see in this picture, it is an aromatic compound, which means the carbon atoms are bonded together in the form of a ring. It is mainly used in medicine thanks to this important property, but not just for anti-inflammatories. It’s highly possible dental care products you use are made from pyridine, since it is effective at removing bacteria within the body.

Maybe you’ve worked in a lab before, and you’ve used pyridine to eliminate a chlorine atom, for example. It makes for a very good base in these kinds of reactions (elimination reactions) or when it reacts with an acid.

Carrying on with the scientific article, these researchers tried so many types of pyridines and realised most of, if not all of, them yielded a certain amount of product. This really makes them stand out from their predecessors in this domain, who could only obtain the yield from one specific type of pyridine, making their procedures very limiting.

As for us, the general public, if you ever found yourself searching for anti-inflammation medicine but were unsuccessful, this huge discovery should “treat” this issue and help provide readily available options for this need!

Source:

Zhou, S., Hou, X., Yang, K., Guo, M., Zhao, W., Tang, X., & Wang, G. (2021). Direct Synthesis of N‑Difluoromethyl-2-pyridones from Pyridines. Journal of Organic Chemistry, 86(9), 6879–6887. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.joc.1c00228

Author:

Andrei Costea