Kymberley Scroggie Progress Blog

[kym834]

Hi all, Kymberley here.

I wanted to introduce myself to you all as I’m a new addition to the SCOPE research group. I have just started at the University of Sydney as a postdoctoral research associate with Alice (@alintheopen) working on the Breaking Good Project. As an organic chemist with a passion for science communication, outreach and education, I’m super excited to be here and can’t wait to get involved!

To start with I’ll be working on conducting a literature review on overpriced medicines. From this we want to create a list of expensive medicines and some possible retrosynthesis towards them that can be used as future Breaking Good projects. As with the Daraprim Project, we hope to collaborate with school and undergraduate students on some of these projects. After all, that’s what Breaking Good is all about.

I’ve also been tasked with creating some resources for those who are new to Breaking Good. These will be including a wiki and a GitHub how-to guide among others. Each will be added to a designated repository on the Breaking Good GitHub platform. Watch this space!

Finally, I’ll be doing some organic synthesis (of course!). While still in the initial planning stages, all the work I do will be open source and I’ll be giving you all regular updates in this issue here on GitHub.

I look forward to working with you all and can’t wait to see what we achieve together.

[jesiathe]

Kym! You're wonderful!

Amazing work.

[kym834]

Well, what a couple of weeks ❗️ ❗️

The COVID-19 pandemic has certainty throw a spanner in the works. We have all had to make a number of changes to how we live our daily lives. Foreseeably with more on the horizon and, so much uncertainty, we have had to reassess our plans for the year.

To do my bit in helping to slow the spread of COVID-19, I started working from home last week. This is something everyone in the SCOPE group has done and I'm really proud of them all for making this selfless decision. It is a particularly difficult change for those of us who work in laboratories. And, it has resulted in the decision to delay my laboratory based research 😞. I'd love to be getting into the lab but it just isn't practical to start as a new member in a laboratory at this time. While I'm disappointed, it does give me more time to thoroughly plan my projects and experiments. No doubt over which time my hungry to be in the lab will only grow and hopefully led to greater productivity once I finally get in there.

In keeping myself busy though, I've been working on the review of expensive medicines. I'm narrowing and definitively defining the scope to determining what data and information I think we need. I've also been thinking about other ideas for how we can collect and use the data. Promising is the possibility of setting up a project for Breaking Good that aims to collect the data via crowdsourcing. A great idea suggested by @yaelago 😃. In a time where practical experiments are severely hampered this will provide a opportunity for people to stay involved in citizen science projects.

I've also been completing wiki pages in the GitHub how-to guide for Breaking Good explaining the features we use and how we use them. The how-to guide is still far from completion but is coming along nicely. I'll be continuing both additions to the how-to guide and the review in the weeks to come.

[kym834]

Hi Everyone 👋

Apologies of the long lapse in time between my updates. It’s been a busy time and a lot has been happening!

I’m most excited to tell you about the new Breaking Good project we have launched, E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$. It is a citizen science project aimed at improving our understanding of the accessibility of essential medicines around the world. It has really taken off and we are now about to start Stage II: The essential medicines’ circle of life. This stage is all about building on the information we collected in Stage I to create a holistic life story for each of the medicines on the WHO essential medicines list.

At the moment the project is focusing on essential medicines in the USA but we recently received a NSW National Science Week Grant to launch the Australian branch of this project and we will be rolling this out in August 😃 If you are interested, you can check out the website and/or the repo here on GitHub for more information on E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$.

In other news, Barker College has been making progress on their synthesis of the iodo analogue of Daraprim and we have been conducting mass and NMR analysis on their samples. It’s still early but it looks like they have been able to synthesise the final product. You can check out what they have been up to here.