What if the gas we burn for heat could be turned into medicine instead? Researchers at CiQUS at the University of Santiago de Compostela explored this in their study "Scientists turn methane into medicine in stunning breakthrough." They developed an iron-based catalyst powered by LED light that turns methane, the main part of natural gas, into chemical building blocks for medicines and other valuable products.
- Natural gas is mostly methane, with some ethane and propane, and today it's mainly burned for heat and electricity, which releases greenhouse gases.
- Scientists have long wanted to turn these gases into useful chemicals instead, but methane is so stable and unreactive that this has been very hard to do.
- The team, led by Martín Fañanás at CiQUS, published the study in Science Advances and created a method that turns methane and other natural gas components into flexible chemical building blocks.
- For the first time, the researchers made a medicine directly from methane: dimestrol, a non-steroidal estrogen used in hormone therapy.
- The process relies on a reaction called allylation, which attaches a small allyl group to the gas molecule to act as a "handle" that chemists can build on to make many different products.
- A major challenge was that the catalyst kept causing unwanted chlorination reactions, so the team designed a custom iron catalyst that controls the highly reactive radicals and keeps those side reactions from happening.
- The method is more sustainable because it uses iron, which is cheap, common, and much less toxic than the rare metals usually used, and it runs on LED light at fairly mild temperatures and pressures.
- The work is part of a larger project funded by the European Research Council to upgrade natural gas into more valuable chemicals, and it could help reduce reliance on traditional petrochemical raw materials over time.
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