Senior Tania Magoon, a Union Scholar who is a double major in chemistry and classics,
reads the Iliad — in Greek — to relax.
But she put down Homer's epic long enough this summer to develop an improved testing procedure
that could be a boon to lab techs and prosecutors alike.
Magoon, a native of Pittsfield, Mass., began her research last summer under the guidance of Prof.
Tom Werner. Their goal was to develop a method to separate the narcotic and inactive forms of the
compound propoxyphene, the ingredient in many painkillers.
In only three weeks, she hit pay dirt.
“I went into Professor Werner's office and said, 'I guess I can go home now. I'm done,'” she recalls.
Actually, Magoon admits, there was much to be done to refine the method, which was based on earlier
research by Michelle Nerozzi '00 and Jen Jakubowski '00. The project, funded by a grant from Pfizer
Pharmaceuticals, was part of Werner's collaboration with scientists at the New York State Forensics
Center in Albany.
The active ingredient in widely prescribed painkillers such as Darvon, propoxyphene is among the top
ten most abused substances, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. The drug's popularity has
spawned an illicit trade that authorities are trying to curb. But success in prosecuting cases has been
limited by a tedious and subjective laboratory procedure that may not hold up in court.
Magoon may have made it easier for laboratory technicians to detect propoxyphene, a so-called “chiral drug”
that consists of mirror-image molecules, only one of which is the active agent. The problem – for scientists
and for prosecutors seeking convictions for drug charges – has been that the test involves only an observation
of crystal patterns in the sample. There is no “hard copy” of the test results, only an interpretation.
Magoon found that a cyclodextrin compound introduced in capillary zone electrophoresis would yield two “spikes,”
one for the L (inactive) form of propoxyphene, another for the D (controlled) form.
The research by Magoon and Werner was supported by a Pfizer's program known as SURF (Summer Undergraduate
Research Fellowships). Last fall, they presented the project to chemists at Pfizer headquarters in Groton,
Conn. The work has also been submitted for presentation at the National American Chemical Society meeting
in San Diego next spring.
“This has really helped us because we haven't had the analytical time to do this on our own,” said Warren
Hull, a forensic scientist for the state lab. “For us, this is a new technique and we hope we can adapt
this directly to other techniques.”
