Potsdam researcher Peter H. Seeberger receives science award in the USA
Development of sustainable and cost-effective drugs — Using plant waste, air and light to become an active ingredient against malaria: The American Chemical Society (ACS) awards Peter H. Seeberger and two colleagues the “ACS Prize for Affordable Green Chemistry” for the development of a particularly efficient chemical process for the production of artemisinin.
All the components required for the production of the active ingredient come from nature: chopped plant residues of the annual mugwort serve as the starting material and the plant’s own chlorophyll serve as a catalyst. Combined with oxygen and light, the active ingredient artemisinin is produced in the laboratory in less than 15 minutes. In nature, the mugwort plant needs three weeks for this. “The chemical process we developed is environmentally friendly and so efficient that we can work in a much more concentrated way than the nature we are imitating here,” says Peter H. Seeberger, Director of the Department of Biomolecular Systems at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam. “In this way, affordable antimalarial drugs can be produced and at the same time our process opens up new possibilities for the sustainable production of other drugs and yet more cheaply than before,” Seeberger adds.
About the research team
The chemist and biochemist Prof. Dr. Peter H. Seeberger has received an award from the American Chemical Society (ACS) for the third time. Among the inventors of the method are the chemist Prof. Dr. Kerry Gilmore from the University of Connecticut, who until recently was a group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, and the process engineer Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Seidel-Morgenstern, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems in Magdeburg.
About the price
Since 2007, the American Chemical Society (ACS) has presented the ACS Award for Affordable Green Chemistry annually in recognition of outstanding scientific discoveries that lay the foundation for more cost-effective and environmentally friendly chemical manufacturing processes.
Kontakt
Juliane Jury
Max-Planck-Institut für Kolloid- und Grenzflächenforschung
+49 331 567-9309