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On a daily basis, I am working most of the time in the medicinal chemistry laboratory. My colleagues and me are involved in making and testing nanoparticles and prodrugs.

This means that we use metals such as gold or palladium and make very tiny nanoparticles thereof. We use these so called transition metals, because they have favourable characteristics, for instance they interact with the prodrugs that we also make. The prodrugs that we develop are medicine to which we add other chemical groups, we do this so that the medicine becomes inactive, which makes it more stable during the travels inside the body, before it reaches the location where it should work as a medicine. The medicine we use can be already existing medicine or newly made molecules. The chemical groups that we attach, to make the medicine inactive (known as prodrug), can interact with the nanoparticles. The nanoparticles are able to remove the added chemical group from the prodrug and make the medicine active again.

The idea behind this method is to prevent that a patient needs to take a lot of medicine, because the medicine might not be stable in the body, because it might interacts with a lot of other things in the body. Furthermore, because the prodrug has to interact with the nanoparticles to become an active medicine, we could potentially implant the nanoparticles inside the body, via surgery. The nanoparticles will be placed for instance close to a tumor, so that the inactive anti-tumor medicine can travel to this specific tumor location and become an active anti-tumor medicine in the tumor area. This would mean that we could get a higher concentration of active medicine to fight the tumor. This is very beneficial for patients, so they will need to take less medicine and have less side effects, because anti-tumor medicine can be very strong for the body. I will not go into detail about why anti-tumor medicine are strong for the body, but if you have any questions about it, don’t hesitate to ask them.

First thing you do upon arriving in the laboratory is to turn on all the machines, then you think about the tests you want to perform on that day. Sometimes I already think about what I want to do when I am in the bus ride to work. It is very important to do this, because a lot of chemical and biological reactions have strict time limits.
You also make your plans so that you have enough time for the lunch and coffee/thee breaks, because working needs to be balanced with some time out of the laboratory. Sometimes you come up with the best solutions for problems during these breaks or you can have a chat about it with other colleagues!
It is also important to write everything that you do down into a lab journal, so you can repeat the exact same reaction, have proof you performed it and can easily use the data for when you have to give a presentation about your project.

More detailed chemical techniques we perform are:

• thin layer chromatography (check how reactions are going)
• liquid extraction (take your product out of the reaction mixture)
• filter liquids, dry liquids and evaporate liquids
• flash chromatography (enables separation of products in a mixture)
• analysis and identification of the product (techniques: NMR, IR, LC-MS)

I try to add some pictures of these chemical techniques asap!