Ben Hui demystifies organic chemistry and talks prodrugs
Dr. Ben Hui is a sessional chemistry instructor with a speciality in organic chemistry. He pursued his Master of Science in Chemistry from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and earned his PhD in chemistry from UBC. Following his PhD, Hui worked to design and synthesize prodrugs to treat inflammatory bowel disease in a postdoctoral fellowship position and also spent a year in industry performing quality assurance. This semester, Hui teaches organic chemistry, but he’s also previously taught first-year chemistry and physical chemistry at UFV.
What’s surprised you about teaching?
It’s not as easy as people think. Some people take it for granted. How hard can teaching be? You just go in and read off some notes or read off some PowerPoint slides. It’s more than that. It’s about engaging. Right now, during the COVID-19 pandemic it’s gotten even harder … In person you get that connection, but online you don’t know what the students are doing. They don’t have their cameras on. They might be sleeping on their bed with their headphones on. You don’t know. They might be having breakfast while I’m talking in the background. It’s really hard to engage students in an online setting. Which is great because the pandemic has given educators like us a lot of opportunities to innovate. To look at ourselves and revamp ourselves and reflect.
How would you describe organic chemistry to someone outside the STEM field?
How would I describe what I do? An architect. Actually, we’re architects and engineers. We design molecules (some of us, not all of us), but most of us are engineers. We build the molecules … We take very complicated-looking target molecules and try to make them in the lab. The question is why? If we can get these very complicated-looking molecules out of nature — extract them from a plant — then what’s the need for making them in a lab? Might as well extract them out of the plant and be done with it. It’s about the challenge, and it’s about discovering new chemistry in the process. It’s a constantly evolving art form.
Part of your research involves prodrugs. Can you define for those without STEM knowledge what a prodrug is?
A prodrug is a drug molecule that’s been inactivated by chemistry — by either linking it to a carrier molecule or chemistry can be done on the actual drug molecule itself. We change the functional group or we modify a certain part of the molecule that takes away its bio activity.
If someone takes the prodrug, it goes into their body, then chemistry happens in their body that will change the prodrug back into the active drug.
For your postdoctoral fellowship position, you mentioned designing and synthesizing prodrugs to treat irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
IBD [irritable bowel disease]. IBS is a functional disorder. There’s no organic cause for it. You stick a scope in someone with IBS, and you can’t find anything. But IBD you can actually see it because it’s an inflammatory condition. Inflammatory bowel disease, which consists of Krohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis — those are two of the main conditions for IBD. The target is to treat them or to design drugs to treat these two conditions because you can actually see these conditions … There’s something to target.
The idea of the prodrug was to stick a known drug for IBD to a carrier molecule. This, combined, is called the prodrug. Because when you stick the active drug onto something else, you inactive it. You take it, and it goes into your system, and it gets broken down. You release the active drug. That was the point: drug delivery.
… It was a known drug we could process from a chemical supplier. But I had to extract the carrier from a plant source. It was a carbohydrate molecule. I extracted it out of the plant, purified it, attached it to the drug — you get that whole molecule. Then we tested it on bacteria — in vitro basically. It seemed to work, and the drug was actually successfully released.
Why do you think there’s this bad reputation around organic chemistry?
Hearsay. I think organic professors as well have given us a bad reputation as a subject. Not all professors — a lot of us are excellent. But some of us bring down the subject because, in my personal opinion, organic chemists have an ego. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, having an ego. But organic chemists have this mentality because we’re always the first ones in the lab in the morning and the last ones to leave, which is true … And they bring that ego with them into the classroom when they teach … It trickles down to the students, and they think, “Wow. Not only is this person super smart — they’re like a walking encyclopedia of organic chemistry — but they’re also super stuck up.” It gives students that impression, and it’s not necessarily the professor’s fault. They’re trying to bring their passion to the students, but in a way that makes the students think, “Oh my god, this is too hard for me. It’s just too much.” Then they start talking to their friends, they start spreading these things to their friends, and it trickles down.
I think the responsibility is on the professor, but of course it helps if the student has passion on the subject as well. But, you know, it’s a vicious cycle. How are you going to get passion without actually knowing about the subject first? That responsibility falls on the professor to try and spark that interest. I guess that’s why Ochem is traditionally regarded as a dreaded subject.
Ben Hui
Chandy is a biology major/chemistry minor who's been a staff writer, Arts editor, and Managing Editor at The Cascade. She began writing in elementary school when she produced Tamagotchi fanfiction to show her peers at school -- she now lives in fear that this may have been her creative peak.
