Considering that you’ve now done the research and the results are known, what is the next step?
DB. One of the obvious next steps is to go from the simplest system that we have of the benzene interactions to a benzene ring where we add chemical groups to different points around the ring, because then they become closer to the actual molecules that are used in the pharmaceutical system. For example, if we add a methyl group, one of the other systems that we studied in the paper was toluenea benzene ring with a CH3 group at one of the positions. What you gain from that is a movement towards a functionalised aromatic unit. We were also testing how that interacts in the liquid state. The next natural step is for us to move into different functional groups. You could move to phenol, where you add an O-H group into the ring, or you could add ammonium-type groups. Essentially, there is a whole book of chemical units that do get added and we need to test each of those in turn. We have the methods now and we’ve proven that we can analyse and interpret the data, so the trick is to move for
