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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • lysdexamphetamine (Vyvanse) is an interesting prodrug version of Adderall that often gets joked about by Felix & a low dosage might address both the short half life of Ritalin while not keeping you too wired to sleep.

    The strategy for Adderall XR is having slow release encapsulation, plus different amphetamine salts which take varied amounts of time to become active.

    Vyvanse instead attaches a lysine amino acid to the amphetamine molecule, rendering it inert until an enzyme in your bloodstream cleaves off the lysine, yielding the active form.

    This prodrug strategy eliminates variables that might affect the release rate of the active drug from an XR capsule before it hits your bloodstream, meaning you get a “spikier” release profile instead of a low & slow consistent dose curve. Variables like a lower stomach pH, which promotes quicker degradation of encapsulation material or how fast the various salts dissociate from the active amphetamine molecule. With the lysine prodrug it doesn’t matter how much of the prodrug enters your bloodstream, it’s release rate is tied to how quickly that enzyme can cleave the lysine off the amphetamine.





  • GOOD advice. I called a uh, “pharmacological audible” switching from Sertraline (Zoloft) to Bupropion XR by asking an RN to prescribe the latter during my 1st quarter of pharm sci/med chem PhD after the Sertraline showed signs it definitely wasn’t working. Felt much better but they still mastered me out a couple years later. I went off it during COVID just to see how I’d fare without & was mostly fine at my 1st job out of school working at a drug delivery startup, but have been considering going back on it; like MeowZedong said, this is a small field & I feel like I’m having a hard time staying motivated to apply for job listings that may get as many as ~500 applicants—all more credentialed than I—ever since that 4 person startup I was working for went under last year.

    One thing to note with Bupropion is skipping 4 days can cause mild amphetamine psychosis, so don’t learn that the hard way when transferring the prescription to a pharmacy that’s closed on weekends. 3-chloro- N-tert butylcathinone, where cathinone is the active ingredient of khat, might’ve been a giveaway with a pharmacophore like that!



  • I’m sure they would, winging seems much more analogus to windsurfing than kiteboarding ever felt (disclaimer you’re hearing this take from a person who last windsurfed at a clinic for teens, and only got up on a kite board once in my early 20s).

    With winging you’ve got the flexibility in changing wind conditions by bringing different sized wings & the portability of kite gear, but actions like jibing and tacking with a wing seem more familiar to what you do when windsurfing vs flying a kite. Manipulating the wing & it’s angle of attack into the wind feels like you’re working a windsurf sail, only it’s leading edge is parallel with the water instead of upright & you no longer have a boom flailing about which might concuss you.

    Again, I’ve never gotten up on the hydrofoil & I hear you need exacting foot placement/balance in order to not drive it into the drink. I had a hard enough time transitioning from kneeling to standing whenever I caught a big enough gust to pop up on the wing board. However, the best part was having the option of simply letting go of the wing whenever I needed to depower. That’s what makes it feel safer to me than previous windsports





  • Not to mention meeting standards of purity and formulating your medication so it’s shelf stable and the active pharm ingredient can be distributed within the body effectively once the medicine is administered.

    I’ve had similar thoughts as these jokers but with using bioreactors. Each time I conclude that the solution is a centralized manufacturing facility owned by workers to effectively produce at scale (and ensure you don’t poison people).

    Sure, you’re not gonna build that misoprostol plant in Texas, but there’s other options to obtain properly-manufactured medication before you drink a mystery brew cooked up by an anarchist squatter named Spoon.


  • Absolutely, and I don’t see biohackers offering up cheap NMR or MS/MS detectors to solve the common issue of inadvertently making side products like MPTP when attempting to cook up MPPP or whatever, consequently injecting Parkinson’s into yourself. So you’re still bound by the enormous costs of getting an analytical lab stood up, despite using “AI” assisted synthetic software to substitute for real verification of each purified intermediate product. Also my other chem friend & I think that Vinni guy is an annoying ted-talk dude fwiw.


  • Very cool that they’ve published a FOSS version of in-silico synthetic software plus designed a jacketed reactor (much more convenient than babysitting a round bottomed flask in a mantle for 12 hours), but I can’t see it getting to very high or even mildy low temps.

    I don’t see much about cleaning the reactor feedlines or reactant reservoirs, nor how you take a reaction product and work it up, or purify it for that matter, in preparation for the next synthetic step. Classico synthesis traditionally structurally elucidates each step’s purified product with NMR before carrying it forward to the next rxn. But I’m a lazy chemist so I’d prefer to program microbes to make things for me (: