{"id":141060,"date":"2026-01-28T11:37:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T11:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/141060\/"},"modified":"2026-01-28T11:37:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T11:37:12","slug":"texas-tap-water-spurs-a-major-drug-purification-discovery-at-swri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/141060\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas tap water spurs a major drug purification discovery at SwRI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Researchers with Southwest Research Institute stumbled onto a chemical purification breakthrough that has potential to bring down drug discovery costs that keep smaller pharmaceutical companies out of the market \u2014 all thanks to a serendipitous discovery and South Texas tap water.<\/p>\n

In 2020, SwRI organic chemist Shawn Blumberg and his lab were up against a tight deadline to purify a batch of compounds being tested as antidotes to chemical weapons and pesticides. Purification is an important part of the drug discovery process, and often an expensive bottleneck for companies.<\/p>\n

Typically, the lab would use purified water as its solvent in the purification process, but their deionized water system was offline.<\/p>\n

So Blumberg got creative: He used tap water with a pinch of hydrochloric acid as a substitute. They achieved unexpectedly good purification results, results that couldn\u2019t be replicated when their deionized water system was back online.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Realizing that South Texas tap water is notoriously hard \u2014 containing elevated levels of calcium chloride and other minerals \u2014 Blumberg wondered: \u201cIs this magic something \u2026 is it calcium?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Fellow SwRI chemist Travis Menard conducted a follow-up study to determine if the results were legit.<\/p>\n

Five years later, the researchers believe their discovery has potential to bring down preventative costs in drug discovery.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you can lower that barrier for entry into the [research and development] then you can get more successful drugs in the clinic,\u201d Blumberg said.<\/p>\n

The importance of purification in drug discovery<\/p>\n

Discovering and synthesizing new drugs for clinical trials and eventually approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expensive, lengthy and filled with failure. <\/p>\n

The average cost of bringing one new drug from discovery all the way to clinical trials and federal approval is $1.3 billion, according to a 2020 JAMA paper<\/a>. Additionally, 90% of clinical drug developments<\/a> fail, never making it past phase I clinical trials.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you can lower that barrier for entry into the [research and development] then you can get more successful drugs in the clinic,\u201d Blumberg said. \u201cRight now, the only players that can play in the environment are big pharma, who has the money to basically throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. If you\u2019re a startup company that\u2019s trying to borrow money from a rich uncle, and then also grant money, it doesn\u2019t go very far.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the earliest stage of drug development, when researchers have chemical compounds they suspect could be developed into a medical treatment, chemists use a technique called chromatography to purify the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) before it can advance to pre-clinical trials.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Purification can be an expensive and time consuming bottleneck for companies, but the SwRI researchers believe they\u2019ve found an inexpensive improvement to the process. It\u2019s a vital step, though, because researchers must ensure that they\u2019ve isolated the specific chemical component they\u2019re aiming for and not others in the drug.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Southwest Research Institute chemist Travis Menard demonstrates the purification process by running a column through one of the Biotage chromatography systems in the SwRI experimental first-phase lab. Credit: Amber Esparza \/ San Antonio Report<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you give a drug that\u2019s not pure enough, and you [conduct] toxicological studies, that\u2019s a problem,\u201d Blumberg said. \u201cIs it the impurities in the drug, or is it the drug itself? And so there\u2019s a conundrum. How pure is too pure? And then how do you do reasonably pure quickly? And that\u2019s where chromatography fits in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Illustrating the importance of chromatography further, Menard explained that there\u2019s a thin line, chemically speaking, between ADHD medications like Adderall and illegal street methamphetamine.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMethamphetamine is actually a prescription drug, you can get that prescribed by your doctor and go pick it up at a pharmacy,\u201d he said. \u201cThe difference there is that it was made under highly controlled conditions by a chemist in a lab and is then extensively purified to become a very pure and safe product. If it gets made on the street, you have no idea what\u2019s left over in there from the making of it. The idea is getting only the thing you want and nothing else so that it\u2019s as safe as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

How chromatography works<\/p>\n

There\u2019s several methods of chromatography, but essentially all of them aim to isolate chemical compounds in a mixture. Coffee companies often use chromatography<\/a> to test the caffeine content of their products. And you\u2019ve probably done chromatography yourself in the form of paper chromatography science experiments<\/a> in school, separating different ink pigments in a water solvent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cChromatography is a means to an end,\u201d Menard said after a short demonstration of SwRI\u2019s chromatography machine. \u201cAnd, it\u2019s a secret, but I hate doing chromatography. It\u2019s time consuming, it can be difficult, so we\u2019re trying to make it a little easier, faster, more cost effective.\u201d<\/p>\n

Publishing research on chromatography itself is unusual, like \u201ca mechanic publishing a paper on a wrench,\u201d Menard later added.<\/p>\n

\"\"Southwest Research Institute Chemist Travis Menard walks through the purification process while showing a column at the end stage of the process on one of the Biotage chromatography systems in the SwRI experimental first-phase lab. Credit: Amber Esparza \/ San Antonio Report<\/p>\n

The process is essentially placing a mixture into a solvent (either liquid or gas), which then gets passed through a column filled with material, called the stationary phase. Usually that material is silica gel, an inexpensive moisture absorber.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The problem is that some compounds don\u2019t separate well with silica gel alone, requiring additional materials that might be 20 to 50 times more expensive and hard to find in bulk. With the help of calcium carbonate though, Menard and Blumberg say their process allows for the use of silica gel alone in many cases.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would never have occurred to me to put salts into the [liquid solvent], specifically calcium,\u201d Blumberg said. \u201cWhen Travis [tested] other salts, calcium was kind of unique in terms of the performance. Not only is calcium pretty inexpensive, but it operates in this niche window \u2026 making the purification much, much better.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers have used the improved \u201cion-assisted chromatography\u201d method on several APIs in development at SwRI in recent years. They soon plan to test this new method on peptide drugs like GLP-1 medications for weight loss and diabetes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFor peptide drugs, purification is probably one of the biggest cost drivers and bottlenecks, and so we\u2019re extremely curious about utilizing this discovery to lower the cost for basically whole categories of drug development,\u201d Blumberg said. \u201cIf this can be applied, you can make some pretty big impacts pretty easily.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers with Southwest Research Institute stumbled onto a chemical purification breakthrough that has potential to bring down drug…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":141061,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[14026,59446,59447,59448,55083,82,84,83,59449,59450,2422,59451,59452,92,59453,3440],"class_list":{"0":"post-141060","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio","8":"tag-biotech","9":"tag-deionized-water","10":"tag-drug-development","11":"tag-drug-discovery","12":"tag-glp-1-drugs","13":"tag-san-antonio","14":"tag-san-antonio-headlines","15":"tag-san-antonio-news","16":"tag-san-antonio-startups","17":"tag-shawn-blumberg","18":"tag-southwest-research-institute","19":"tag-swri","20":"tag-texas-tap-water","21":"tag-top-story","22":"tag-travis-menard","23":"tag-wc-1000-1500"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}