A Chinese University chemistry graduate and his Nobel laureate mentor at Harvard University have devised a new way to substantially reduce the cost of the production of Tamiflu and improve its supply.
Yeung Ying-yeung, a postdoctoral fellow who works with emeritus professor of organic chemistry Elias James Corey at Harvard University, said yesterday from Boston that their hope was for Roche to allow other companies to manufacture the drug using their procedure so there would be enough supply in the event of a bird flu pandemic.
Professor Corey, a 1990 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, developed the new procedure. He asked Dr Yeung, 26, and another fellow, South Korean Sung Woo-hong, to test and refine it in the laboratory at Harvard's chemistry and chemical biology department.
Dr Yeung, a PhD graduate in chemistry at Chinese University, made further improvements to Professor Corey's approach.
The recipe was described in the online edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society last month.
Dr Yeung said the process was put into the public domain with the hope of stimulating others to find different ways of making Tamiflu.