Drug derivatives are pretty common in chemistry and pharma. First-order derivatives are drugs that are created from the parent drug via just one chemical react

Drug derivatives are pretty common in chemistry and pharma. First-order derivatives are drugs that are created from the parent drug via just one chemical reaction. there are derivatives of derivatives which create (fun, lol) headaches for pharma licensing and marketing regulatory authorities. Ecgonine is a tropane derivative from coca leaves and is convertible 2-carbomethoxytropinone and then cocaine. Another example is making buprenorphine from thebaine which is used for making oxycodone, oxymorphone, buprenorphine, naloxone and other opiate agonists. US Controlled substances act in 1986 spelled out the number of steps was irrelevant. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsomega.0c00282 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsomega.0c00282 Another area we're seeing twice and third derivatives to get around regulatory & consumer purview is perfluoroalkyl chemicals ie PFOAs, PFAS, PFOS. Consumers and regulators start avoiding or banning some of them, let's just spin up some derivatives of the perfluorooctane sulfonic acids that they haven't cracked down on yet and put that in everything until the people become savvy and then we'll move on to newer harmful unbanned things!