Perhaps my Google skills are weak, and I did a search here on the SD, but I cannot find a simple explaination of how drugs are made from petroleum oil. I searched because I was reading a harangue on “synthetic oil-based pharmaceuticals”, and i just wondered how exactly they were made.
There’s plenty of info about this substance and that, and testing of the purified chemicals, but I want to know the process from crude oil to pharmaceutical. How is it extracted?
I don’t want this to become a harangue on the pharmaceutical industry, so don’t go off on that; just asking for a simple decription of the process, and thought the better minds here could direct me towards the best info. Thanks.
It sounds like you’re referring to pharmaceuticals for external use, such as different lotions and creams which are made with pharmaceutical grade petrolatum or mineral oil (often used as bases for different topical medications). Also tar made from petroleum is used in topical medications for psoriasis.
Or are you talking about some type of internal medication?
In the end, the drug industry is all about organic chemistry. Petroleum is a rich source of organics, and I suspect we’d synthesize everything from crude oil if it were viable. In fact many drug precursors probably come indirectly from petroleum, now that I think about it. A link to said harangue would be helpful. My whacko-sense tells me that this may be partly about linking two hated industry to create the shock value of “no blood for Prozac”.
As a followup, drug syntheses are usually pretty involved themselves, not to mention the failed attempts along the way, so it’s pretty likely that something that you use to make the drug came from petroleum.
Whee! A subject on which I can speak with a modicum of authority, having spent six years scaling up pharmaceutical intermediates.
Pharmaceuticals are typically large organic molecules. Large organic molecules are typically built by starting with small organic molecules and adding bits here and there, building them up and linking them as you go. I like to think of it as working with *very * tiny Legos.
Where do we get small organic molecules? Very frequently from refined petroleum. Crude oil is cracked and refined, a process by which the various small molecules get separated and sorted.
Additionally, linking these molecular bits is normally done in solution. Organic bits aren’t water soluble for the most part, but rather in organic solvents. (methanol, ethyl acetate, heptane, toluene, etc.) Where do we get these organic solvents? Yep. Petroleum.
Sometimes the pharmaceutical itself has a “natural” origin. Take Taxol, for instance. It was isolated from a particular pacific yew. Simple! You say, round up the yew trees, collect Taxol, step 3 profit! No petroleum needed! Not so fast. There’s very little taxol per yew. Add to that the fact that the Taxol was probably isolated by extracting from the yew via organic solvents. (pesky petroleum again) All the yew trees on the west coast wouldn’t give you enough Taxol to make it marketable. Bring in the organic chemists and the petroleum based chemicals again. In this case they found a more abundant natural source that could be transformed to the chemotheraputic in a handful of steps, so it ended up being a natural/petro combo. More about Taxol here. Editing to add that close review of the link indicates that they’re using a cell culture method for production now. Anyway, my point is still valid until they find a way to make superbugs spit out all the drugs.
This is why you can’t really divide the molecules of the universe into “synthetic oil-based” and “natural.” So called natural products can be made via synthetic means. This doesn’t mean a completely synthesized Taxol molecule (it’s been done from nearly scratch, IIRC) is any different from one that grew in the bark of a yew tree. A molecule is a molecule. But chances are if it’s a designer molecule like a pharmaceutical, it’s had some sort of petroleum derived history.
Thanks for all replies, and especially Solfy; your reply helped me understand the process better. The example of Taxol is a good one; I’m familiar with that story, know one of the pharmacognocists involved with the breakthrough of taxus species as usable.
I did go to Wiki first to try to understand where the origin of drugs in manufacture, and it just wasn’t clear. So, Solfy, since you have the good experience; petroleum is refined and broken down into it’s components, and then the purified substance is distributed to pharmaceutical companies for research and development. The harangue I read was pretty out there, and I don’t agree with it. “All synthetic petrochemicals are poison,” yadda yadda. I’m for medicine that helps people.
But, I was also struck by the fact that I could not find a simple explaination online where drugs come from at the source. The specifics might be proprietary, but the basics of extraction from petroleum sources would seem to be something everyone would want to know, in the manner of “this is where we are with medicine”.
Except that it’s misleading to say that we “extract” drugs from petroleum. We extract quinine from the bark of a tree found in the Philippines. We may extract some sort of pharmaceutical from petroleum, but one does not come to mind offhand.
Most of the stuff we use in or on our bodies are mixtures of ingredients. An ingredient may be extracted in its final form from something in nature. It can also be synthesized in a chemical reaction from basic building blocks; the building blocks are what are extracted from nature.
A fun and ironic example is aniline dye. Its discoverer was looking for an artificial source of quinine in coal tar; instead, he produced a easily-used dye that produced a wonderful purple color. It is the forerunner of all modern dyes. He extracted part of the dye from coal tar, and combined it in a chemical reaction with other building blocks to get the final product.
Did he extract aniline dye from coal tar? You could say that, but it would be a bit misleading.
Same goes for pharmaceuticals. We may get some of the basic building blocks from oil. This goes beyond my memory, but I think we may synthesize some of the amines that go into sulfa drugs from basic molecules we get from petroleum. We do not get amines directly from petroleum!
The most likely ingredient from petroleum is likely to be an oil or ointment used in an externally-applied pharm. Neosporin, for example, uses petrolatum (aka Vaseline) which comes from petroleum. It was, in fact, first discovered in the first oil wells!
In fact, the active ingredient in most pharmaceuticals these days is likely to be some sort of natural product that we do in fact extract from a plant or animal.
Why? Medicine is so far removed from petroleum that it’s like observing that our bodies are made of the fusion of dying stars, and wondering if we might not shine light out of our butts. It’s so far removed that it’s virtually irrelevant.
Besides, it’s not as if these medicines could only have been made of petroleum. The basic building blocks exist in every living thing, in slighly more assembled format. It just turns out that the basic forms exist in the greatest quantities in petroleum.
OK, I hear you, but please elaborate on it. From what Solfy posted, many pharmaceuticals are derived from petroleum. Is that true, or are there other sources, and what are they? I’m just looking for simple answers/
I fear I have misled you. We don’t extract the pharmaceuticals from petroleum. We extract many of the small molecules needed to assemble the pharmaceuticals from petroleum.
Going back to Taxol, since it’s a great example - we extract the precursor molecule from tree bark. Probably we extract that using a petrochemical solvent (I could be wrong - this isn’t the end I work on). Mash up tree bark, pour solvent over it, precursor dissolves in solvent, filter off bits of leftover tree. Strip off solvent, collect precursor. (along with a whole host of other organic molecules which now have to be separated out)
Take your drug precursor and manipulate it chemically. Frequently these chemical manipulations are done in petrochemically derived solvents, possibly with petrochemically derived reagents (but not necessarily). These manipulations switch out and/or add different bits of the molecule until you’ve got the Taxol molecule. The pharmaceutical didn’t come from petroleum, but it was made with the assistance of petroleum-sourced products.
You are correct in questioning the “all synthetic petrochemicals are poison” bit. Methylene chloride (a common solvent) would not be a good thing to drink. However, it’s a useful solvent to disovle organic molecules, react them with other molecules, and isolate. Is there methylene chloride in the final product? Not if you’ve isolated it correctly. Is methylene chloride useful? Yes! It would be next to impossible to do organic chemistry without petrochemicals. This does NOT mean pharmaceuticals are floating around in the crude oil waiting for us to gather them.
Where to find pharmaceutical molecules is BIG business. People are constantly isolating secrections from leaches, bits of sea sponges, compounds from pepper plants, horomones from horse urine. The world is made of molecules, and some of them are handy for treating diseases. It’s a matter of finding the molecules that are useful, verifying their usefullness, verifying that they are not harmful in ways that negate their usefulness, and finding a way to mass produce them.
When it comes down to it, no matter how you’ve mass produced a molecule, it’s still just a molecule no matter what its origin.
It is very misleading to say that most, even many, recently introduced pharmaceuticals are some sort of natural product extracted from natural sources. While this was closer to true at one time (e.g., antibiotics and hormones), science has changed so much that natural products are rarely acceptable as drugs. There are some cases where a natural ligand to a receptor or an antibody can be the starting point for drug development, but medicinal (organic) chemists will modify it to improve many of its properties (e.g., the way it is metabolized in the body, its size, its immunogenicity for an injectable, its solubility, its absorption). The “starting point” is often not even recognizable in the end product that results from these changes.
None of the compounds on the top ten worldwide best selling drugs are in any way, shape, or form natural product extracts.
Even many biological products (e.g., new insulin analogs, antibodies) are modified to improve their biological properties or their manufacturability properties. Almost all the modern bioproducts are produced in recombinant bacteria or yeast so there is some modification to suit their manufacturing.
Well, you can use several methods to destroy longer organic chains to turn them into petroleum (or to be more precise, petroleum-like product, since petroleum generally refers to the substances occurring naturally). Basically you can take biological matter, like human and animal carcasses, vegetable matter, etc. and turn it into crude oil, then you can use roughly the same process to derive pharmaceuticals as we do now.
I wonder if this analogy might help. The mouse in your hand, if mostly plastic, could be said to be derived from petroleum. Cracking of petroleum to something like ethylene and then polymerisation led to the plastic used in the case and many of its components. However, the complexity of a mouse is far removed and unrelated to what is found in petroleum. Mice are not found in petroleum but it does play a vital role in their manufacture.
Please understand you are looking for simple answers to a complex question. There is only so much that this can be simplified.
To take one example, one of the commonest simple building blocks of pharmaceutical compounds is the benzene ring. These are found in virtually every living thing (for example, the amino acid phenylalanine), and they are ubiquitous in pharmaceuticals as welll (for example Prozac). If you look at the structures of all those molecules you see a benzene ring. If you were to try to get a free benzene ring from animal or plant sources, you’d have to do some work to break it down to the basic form. It just so happens that petroleum has a significant fraction of free benzene… why? Because it’s made of dead life-forms, nature has already broken it down for us. So it makes the most sense to source it from there.
Petrol based products are initially just carbons and hydrogens stuck together in rings and chains (about 10-40 atoms). Good for burning, but not water soluble and only dont really interact or affect people much.
To create biological relevant drugs you need to stick lots of oxygens, nitrogens and sulfurs on them. This makes them more water soluble and give points of biochemical reaction/interaction. Thats what the organic chemist does, as well as making them bigger often. It might take 40 reactions to turn a raw petrochemical into Taxol, or perhaps 2-3 into something simple like asprin.
There are many chemicals than can be derived from animals or plant sources used for drug manufacture too (e.g. aspirin). In many cases both petroleum or natural chemicals are similarly priced, but usually one or the other is much cheaper. The petroleum and naturally derived chemicals will be identical in all ways and one will not be better or worse for you.
Thanks greatly for the above posts, they have clarified the process for me. I was using the term"extract" to mean “made from”, and I see now that it is a more specific term in chemistry, as opposed to synthesizing molecules from a source.
Brain Glutton, this was very helpful:
Thanks again to all for the help in understanding.
Actually, these statements are not as true as they sound. Naturally-occurring compounds are not necessarily the same as their synthetic counterparts, despite being EXACT CHEMICAL DUPLICATES. They do not bear the same properties and they do not have the same effects.
Take Marinol, for example. It is delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol. In every scientific definition, Marinol is the mirror image of the natural compound found in *Cannabis Sativa * L., but numerous studies have shown that the effect of the synthetic Marinol are not only not the same, but far inferior to the natural form found in the wild. It can’t be explained in scientific terms, outside of the statement: “results are not typical and are, therefore, unreliable.”
It’s an insurance policy, so to speak, established by Mother Nature (God, All That Is, Brahma, Light, The Universe, The Great Unconscious, Etc) to prevent humans from synthesizing their way out of a balanced, natural world.
In other words, it is the Universe keeping us from “playing God”.
A thing can be proven through the scientific method, but that does not mean it can be successfully replicated. ~Brian Reymore
You are making a fundamental error in your reasoning.
The “mirror image” cannot be an “exact chemical duplicate”. If it were an exact chemical duplicate, it wouldn’t be the mirror image, it would be the compound itself.
Quote from Wikipedia, bolding mine. Some organic molecules exist in different isomers (mirror images), and it’s well known that the biological effects of one isomer may differ from the the biological effects of the other isomer. A competent chemist with the appropriate tools is perfectly able to distinguish analytically between two different isomers of the same compound.
Another example is the molecule vanillin. Vanillin can be synthesized from petroleum-based precursors or from the natural lignin in wood. Provided sufficient purity of the sample, no-one will be able to tell you where that vanillin came from. However, wood-based vanillin is more popular as a flavoring compound in foods, because it’s (irrationally) regarded as more “natural”, while petrochemical-based vanillin is preferred as a precursor for medical drugs, since it’s actually easier to produce in sufficient purity for the pharmaceutical industry
Short version of the above: If the synthetic molecule is an exact chemical duplicate, no-one, neither Nature nor the analytical chemist will be able to tell whether the molecule is of “natural” or “synthetic” origin.