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Concept
Semisynthesis
Summary
Semisynthesis, or partial chemical synthesis, is a type of chemical synthesis that uses chemical compounds isolated from natural sources (such as microbial cell cultures or plant material) as the starting materials to produce novel compounds with distinct chemical and medicinal properties. The novel compounds generally have a high molecular weight or a complex molecular structure, more so than those produced by total synthesis from simple starting materials. Semisynthesis is a means of preparing many medicines more cheaply than by total synthesis since fewer chemical steps are necessary.
Drugs derived from natural sources are usually produced by isolation from the natural source or, as described here, by semisynthesis from such an isolated agent. From the viewpoint of chemical synthesis, living organisms are remarkable chemical factories that can easily produce structurally-complex chemical compounds by biosynthesis. In contrast, engineered chemical synthesis is necessarily simpler, with a lower chemical diversity in each reaction, than the incredibly-diverse biosynthesis pathways that are crucial to life.
As a result, certain functional groups are much easier to prepare by engineered synthesis than others, such as acetylation, in which certain biosynthetic pathways can generate groups and structures with minimal economic input that would be prohibitive via total synthesis.
Plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria are all used as sources for those tricky precursor molecules, including the use of bioreactors at the meeting point between engineered and biological chemical synthesis.
Semisynthesis, when it is used in drug discovery, aims to retain the sought-after medicinal activity while other molecule characteristics are altered, such as those that affect its adverse events or its oral bioavailability in a few chemical steps. In that regard, semisynthesis stands in contrast with the approach of total synthesis, whose aim is to arrive at a target molecule from low-molecular-weight, inexpensive starting materials, often petrochemicals or minerals.
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