WHEN IT COMES to protecting the environment, chemicals don't always have the best of reputations. But chemistry can be green too, argues one researcher from University College Dublin. By making therapeutic drugs in the lab, chemists can help save plants with medicinal value from being over-exploited.
"Nature can design very complicated chemicals, and some of them happen to be able to treat diseases like cancer," says Billy Fleming, a PhD candidate at UCD's centre for synthesis and chemical biology.
However, increased demand for new drugs can outstrip nature's ability to supply, and over-exploiting plants that produce therapeutic drugs threatens their conservation, he says. Examples of medicinal plants under threat include the Pacific Yew tree, which makes the anti-cancer drug taxol. Around 3,000 trees need to be destroyed for one kilo of the drug, according to Fleming.
This is the type of situation where chemists can step in and aid conservation, by examining the structures of the therapeutic molecules produced by the plant and making them in the lab instead. "If you just take it from nature once and then you see what it looks like, you can make it in the lab as opposed to taking it from a tree and knocking down that tree," says Fleming.
Last week he won AccesScience, an annual competition where third-year PhD candidates from within UCD's Conway Institute explain their work to a public audience. Fleming received first prize from broadcaster Pat Kenny, who hosted the event, for an engaging talk on The Nature of Chemistry, which looked at Fleming's own research area of making catalysts, or small molecules that help chemical reactions to proceed.
Catalysts are often needed to facilitate the steps to make therapeutic drugs in the lab, and they encourage chemical units to build up together like Lego to make the final structure, explains Fleming.
"Generally the types of catalysts that are made these days for these types of reactions are a metal surrounded by small chemical scaffold," he says. "It's this scaffold that dictates how the reaction will proceed, and it's the metal on which the chemicals can come together and bind, so it's the scaffolding that controls the outcome."
And ultimately nature is the inspiration for Fleming's line of work. "Nature makes biological catalysts and we have to replicate nature but in essentially a simpler way," he says.
Belinda Maher from UCD's school of molecular and medical science won second prize in the AccesScience competition for her talk, Neutrophils - The Jekyll & Hyde of Inflammation.
Her work looks at approaches to stop injury-fighting cells called neutrophils from damaging the heart during surgery.
Claire O'Connell