Using Chiral Spectroscopy to Enhance Quality Control in Drugs

The Kotov Lab at the University of Michigan is working to evade the devastating effects of unsafe drugs with a new method of drug screening and quality control.

“We foresee new roads ahead—for instance using terahertz waves with tailored polarization to manipulate large molecular assemblies. It might replace microwaves in many synthesis applications in which the handedness of the molecules matters,” said André Farias de Moura  , professor of chemistry at the Federal University of São Carlos and co-corresponding author.

Transcript

00:00:00 Some of the wrong chiralities  in biomolecules can be devastating for your body,   as it had been already in the past  with a number of chiral drugs. The simplest chiral structure is a helix, and it can be left and right.   If we shine the left helical light to a left  helical crystal, we have stronger absorption   of that light. If it's of opposite  helicity, it will absorb less. With this type of spectroscopy and chiral  phonons, you have a very sensitive way to   establish what kind of chiralities your drugs are,  your peptides, your supplements are — What kind of   chemical changes happen to them between the  synthesis, and maybe storage, transportations?   And you have a very accurate readout  in this spectra, in terms of terahertz   circular dichroism spectra, to establish  whether you have some alternations.