Researchers in the Vosburg Lab in the Department of Chemistry at Harvey Mudd College have designed a new, environmentally friendly method to make lidocaine that is ideally suited for undergraduate organic chemistry laboratory courses.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe developed a milder, simpler and less hazardous route to the common local anesthetic lidocaine than the traditional two-step route used industrially and in teaching labs,\u201d says chemistry professor David Vosburg, who performed the research with Michelle Lee \u201922, Emily Shimizu \u201920, Professor Roc\u00edo G\u00e1mez-Monta\u00f1o and graduate student Alejandro Renter\u00eda (collaborators from University of Guanajuato) and Vosburg\u2019s son, Nathan, now a junior in high school. The research, \u201cMulticomponent Synthesis of Lidocaine at Room Temperature<\/a>,\u201d is published online by the Journal of Chemical Education<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cLidocaine is generally still made the same way as when it was discovered in 1946, with only rather minor modifications,\u201d Vosburg says. \u201cA completely different way to make it was reported in 1959, but it used some rather nasty and toxic reagents. We replaced the worst of those and streamlined the process for a remarkably effective, one-step preparation of lidocaine at room temperature.\u201d<\/p>\n Lee and Shimizu, both majoring in chemistry and biology, contributed to this work over several years. \u201cShimizu did some of the early work on this experiment while I was in Mexico working on alternative procedures with my collaborators at the University of Guanajuato,\u201d says Vosburg. Upon Vosburg\u2019s return to HMC, Lee and Nathan Vosburg\u00a0(then a first-year student at Upland High School) performed the key optimization experiments in the lab in fall 2019.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was Nathan\u2019s science fair project that year, and he\u2019s thinking of applying to Harvey Mudd this fall,\u201d Vosburg says. Lee, who graduated this month from HMC is taking a job in industry, and Shimizu is finishing her second year in the chemistry PhD program at University of California, Irvine. While at HMC, Shimizu co-authored another published article<\/a> with Vosburg, Johnson Hoang \u201820 and two UCLA collaborators on a different green chemistry project. Lee and Nathan presented a poster on the lidocaine research at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego in March 2022.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Researchers in the Vosburg Lab in the Department of Chemistry at Harvey Mudd College have designed a new, environmentally friendly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":145,"featured_media":9799,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,14,26,30],"class_list":["post-9798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chemistry","category-faculty","category-research","category-students"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/145"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}