analyticalchemistsouls - Tumblr blog

[analyticalchemistsouls]

Overview of an Analytical Chemist in Pharma

I work as an analytical chemist in pharma and I am super happy at my job. It’s engaging, thought provoking, and best of all, I get to mess around with a lot of different specialized equipment. 

So there’s basically 3 major stages in the drug development process: research, development, and commercialization. For the first seven years, I worked in research. I supported the medicinal chemists in their projects by purifying tons and tons of compounds using  high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLCs). About 3 years into my job, we bought the good shit--the state of the art SFC systems, which is exactly like HPLC, except instead of using a liquid mobile phase like water and acetonitrile mixtures, it uses supercritical CO2. The modifiers used has to be volatile, so we usually used methanol with it. 

SFC is kind of like a hybrid between LC and GC (gas chromatography). Run times are super fast, and peak shapes are sharp. Additionally, you can even use your LC columns on it, provided that you don’t use it for LC again, and it probably won’t last for very long if its not rated for very high pressures. 

Sorry I got sidetracked. Anyway, now I find myself in the second stage of drug development--which is... development. I’ve only been doing this job less than 1 year, so I’m pretty much a noob again. 

Essentially after a compound has been identified as a drug candidate (passed in-vitro and in-vivo testing), then it’s time for it to move to clinical stages. Here, we kind of already know how to make the drug, but the process was meant for a small scale. Now we have to worry about supplying a large number of people, so the entire process may have to be overhauled depending on how efficient, expensive, and safe the original route is.

This is the job of the process chemist. Things like DMSO, DMAc, acetonitrile, etc. are not really good solvents to do reactions in large scale, so they have to come up with new cost-effective and safer ways to create that molecule. And my job is to support the process chemists by testing the compound at every step of the way to ensure we’re still making the same compound. Also we have to analyze much more closely if any impurities or degradants are forming because we certainly do not want to supply people with impure compounds. 

This process is waaaaaaaay more involved than I can write about, and definitely waaaaaay more intensive than my previous job in research. Before, all I was doing was chromatography. And I got really good at it! But now I get to reeaaally be an analytical chemist. I have a bunch of other techniques I need to learn (re-learn since we did go over them in uni), and also a lot more critical thinking is involved in solving process problems that come up. 

As for commercialization, I’m not really involved in that, but this is when our reps get to go talk to doctors to tell them about our product and see if it would be a good fit for their patients. I guess from an analytical chemistry standpoint, it’s not like we just wash our hands off it--we still need to review and validate the release of our products to ensure everything is up to specs. 

[analyticalchemistsouls]

Using long exposure on his camera, PhD candidate David Nadlinger took a photo of an atom illuminated by a laser, while it was suspended in the air by two electrodes. (For a sense of scale, the two electrodes on either side of the atom are 2mm apart). The reason why you’re able to see the atom is because it absorbed and re-emitting the light particles that the laser projected. (David Nadlinger/University of Oxford/EPSRC)