Description

Hopewell Valley Student Podcasting Network

Chemistry Connections

Pharmaceutical Chemistry

Episode #7  

Welcome to Chemistry Connections, my name is Eve O’Leary and I am your host for Episode 7 called Pharmaceutical Chemistry. Today I will be discussingThe Thalidomide Tragedy.

Segment 1: Introduction to The Thalidomide Tragedy

Developed in Germany in the 1950s, thalidomide is a sedative drug that was administered to pregnant women experiencing morning sickness and insomnia associated with pregnancy. After its five years spent on the market, it was later discovered that the medicine was the cause for babies being born with a rare birth defect, phocomelia, resulting in severely malformed and underdeveloped limbs. 

• The majority of these deformities occurred in Canada, the United Kingdom, and West Germany. 
• Thalidomide was never approved for public consumption in the US
• The experiments were extremely poorly designed lacking a placebo group, excluding information for how long the treatment had gone on for, and failed to use a double blind procedure. 

The drug was withdrawn from shelves by the German distributor, Chemie Grunenthal on November 26, 1961 and was recalled from British shelves on December 2, 1961.

• The British Committee on the Safety of Drugs was established in June 1963, offering detailed regulations for the testing of potentially toxic effects on offspring using rats, mice, and rabbits. 
• Thalidomide cannot be administered to anyone who is possibly or is pregnant, and is instead used to treat a number of cancers and skin conditions such as leprosy. 

Segment 2: The Chemistry Behind The Thalidomide Tragedy

Before we start talking about why thalidomide had the effects that it had, let's start by talking about some of its general properties. Below is the chemical structure of thalidomide compound (C13H10N2O4). 

Thalidomide contains several different intermolecular forces:

• London Dispersion Forces
• Dipole-dipole interactions
• Hydrogen bonding
• Extremely important in drug design. 
• More energy is required to break the compounds apart. Has a boiling point of approximately 509.7OC and is insoluble in water

Now that we have a good understanding about the properties of thalidomide, a key understanding of chirality is essential in explaining the issue with the drug. Chirality, key to organic chemistry, is a geometric property used to describe mirror image isomers, called enantiomers, that are not...