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This is very cool. Particularly interesting is the approach of Corey and colleagues in the application of an open-source approach towards the development and improvement on an importan process. I wonder if other chemists will join in the fray for a friendly competition to see who can come up with the best (open) process for making Tamiflu.

probably not. the hurdles to bringing a drug to market (at least in the US) include millions of dollars worth of testing and prototyping to satisfy FDA requirements. nobody's going to 'open source' that risk.

Ok, so I have my dremel and twist ties ready, but Im stuck at step 10 with the way the carbon ring and extra hydrogen keep collapsing my molecule and spewing green smoke all over the kitchen. Has anyone else gotten this far in the Tamiflu process?

Actually, the interest in the open source approach was not so much around the possibility of making the drugs outside of the highly controlled pharma manufacturing and testing environment, but that the concept of an open-source approach to the synthesis process that is interesting, and a complement to the general practice of highly proprietary behavior in pharma companies.

I am mostly interested to see if the company manufacturing the drug validates and implements the new process, and to see if generic companies set up production lines to support the manufacture of the compound in the event that demand causes the Government to more widely source the compound.

AKA: How to get a bunch of people to create the next superflu by self-diagnosing and forcing the virus to evolve further.

The new approach is better because it avoids having to extract shikimic acid from star anise, which is the rate-limiting ingredient in the old process.

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