Interested in finding a better way to develop drugs to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Northeastern researcher Jeffrey Agar and a team of scientists came up with a technique that improves the drug discovery workflow for an entire class of pharmaceuticals.

“This could now become the gold standard for how covalent drugs are developed from now on,” says Agar, an associate professor of chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences.

The goal is to make the technique free and available to labs small and large, part of what Agar refers to as the “democratization of science.”

“We decided not to patent this,” he says. “Just take it, use it and make drugs safer.”

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Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University