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Comment by tsmarsh | Hacker News Reader

I work in Pharma, we're not worried yet. We've done a few trials of nano-fabs, essentially 3D printed labs where you inject the raw materials and drugs pop out the end.

They kind of work, but its still a lot of work and would mean consumers getting hands on a bunch of controlled substances.

Being able to produce meth in a 'lab' that fits in your hand is not crazy... except you can clearly see how crazy that is.

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Ignore the legal aspect of this - if the technology gets good enough and cheap enough people will make their own nano-fabs and damn the laws. People would LOVE to pirate pharmaceuticals. It's an industry just begging for disruption.

A way to synthesize arbitrary chemicals in a printer is worth trillions of dollars. It goes well beyond pharmaceuticals, but for a start, it would drive healthcare costs down to basically free.

I’m not talking about nano-fabs. From a pharma perspective, I’m talking about moleculars that are produced in GMP facilities and sold like any other USP, not for human use. This is admittedly dangerous because the formulations could have contaminants. However, even in FDA-approved pharma, you get things like NDMA being used as a solvent and ending up as millimolar fractions, and the drugs don’t even get pulled for months after discovery by some random independent lab. There are thousands of moleculars that pharma will never push through the FDA because it’s a natural human protein fragment and therefore impossible to patent and profit from.

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