Making better medicines with a handful of chemical building blocks

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Soon, making and improving medical drugs could be as easy for chemists as stacking blocks is for a child. University of Illinois chemist Martin Burke, a pioneer of a technique that constructs complex molecules from simple chemical 'building blocks,' led a group that found that thousands of compounds in a class of molecules called polyenes -- many of which have great potential as drugs -- can be built simply and economically from a scant one dozen diff...