Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Outsourcing small molecule ligand receptor binding research

burnbar - 3-8-2024 at 12:29

For my future carreer i've got my eye on drug discovery science.
Currently I'm studying engineering and I plan to practice writing research papers on my own which may eventually transform in actually publishing papers.
The only problem is that in vitro research is quite heavely regulated so even if I make substances which might have interesting receptor interactions, I can't do any research on human or animal cells.

I am however quite experienced with the chinese pharmaceutical industry and was thinking of outsourcing the actual in vitro practical parts to pharmaceutical companies I have a good bond with so I can actually write papers with something else than just speculation for my results and actually produce material that at least has some sort of impact.

Does this idea sound reasonable? Otherwise I really don't see any way I could be able to research biological interactions.

Thanks

bnull - 3-8-2024 at 14:55

By engineering you mean pharmaceutical engineering or chemical engineering?

burnbar - 3-8-2024 at 16:16

Quote: Originally posted by bnull  
By engineering you mean pharmaceutical engineering or chemical engineering?


Technically chemical engineering but it's more process engineering aimed at food and pharmaceuticals.
So industrial scale paracetamol/norephedrine with some mangoes thrown in here and there cause circular economy. Why?

I'm actually working on a mri tracer project for a hospital.

bnull - 4-8-2024 at 05:31

Quote: Originally posted by burnbar  
Why?

I was in doubt about which one you were studying. It's no big deal, you can always learn what you need from pharmaceutical engineering.

I'd tell you to focus on using artificial intelligence to help discover drugs instead of doing that by yourself and sending samples for trial. It is simply amazing what has been done the last 2, 3 years (probably more but I haven't paid much attention to these developments since college, and back then I was spending more time on other areas, especially mathematics). Study, understand, develop AI/machine learning tools.

Did you talk about that with any of your professors? Even when mine couldn't point a way, at least they showed the worst that could happen, such as becoming an expert in an obsolete field.

burnbar - 4-8-2024 at 09:50

Well, one of the subjects we'd get at my masters is computer aided drug design and I'm currently in the process of finding receptor ligand binding software that is actually user friendly and also able to do small molecule binding.

My current professors can't really help me because I mostly just want to have more experience with these kinds of research and subjects before starting my masters because I didn't really get anything like this at my current study, it's more a specialisation of chemical engineering.

I want to be able to do independent research of subjects that I personally find interesting on the side and not just be limited to what I get appointed to. That's in like 3-4 years though but it takes time to set things up so I figured I better start early.

I'm pretty good at my study but that's mostly because I find it interesting and do a lot of work by myself on the side.

bnull - 4-8-2024 at 11:21

Quote: Originally posted by burnbar  
I want to be able to do independent research of subjects that I personally find interesting on the side and not just be limited to what I get appointed to.

You can begin by repeating research that has been done and published before for practice. Something from 10, 20 years ago, is quite well documented. It's possible you can even discover something new during the process.