Worcester Polytechnic Institute researcher Patricia Zhang Musacchio has been awarded $1.8 million by the National Institutes of Health for her research creating a process to help scientists create new drugs.
The process Musacchio is developing breaks down the bond between carbon and hydrogen atoms using visible light, allowing chemists to customize small molecules to target processes in the body. Existing technologies to do this are difficult and energy intensive.
“Drug developers are almost guaranteed to have carbon-hydrogen bonds in a drug compound, so finding a robust way to transform those bonds and change the molecule’s structure, and therefore its medicinal properties, would be a very powerful approach,” Musacchio said in a WPI announcement.
Musacchio is an assistant professor in WPI’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
