While beer connoisseurs have mixed and heated opinions about the trend of ever-more hoppy beers, some researchers just can’t get enough of the bitter buds.

Their keen interest stems from the potentially untapped medicinal properties of the flowers. Traditional medicine has long used hops for everything from sedation to combatting infections. And researchers have noted that the plant’s chemical constituents appear to have anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and anti-cancer activities. Yet chemists are still working out all the chemicals responsible for the potentially therapeutic effects and how to use them to brew up new medicines.

Now, with two new studies, researchers report that they’re getting closer to pinning down and optimizing hop-based medicines.

In one study, appearing in the Journal of Natural Products, a team of Italian researchers identified three previously unknown chemicals from Cascade hops—which are used in many American brews, but perhaps notably as a finishing hop in Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale. One of the chemicals has clear anti-inflammatory properties.

In a second study, presented this week at the American Chemical Society’s annual conference in San Diego, researchers from the University of Idaho report figuring out a streamlined procedure for making synthetic versions of two key hop chemicals, humulone and lupulone, which are known to have antimicrobial and anticancer activity. With their artificial versions, the researchers plan to make an assortment of chemical tweaks to optimize the compounds for disease-busting drugs.

These helpful chemicals are in beer, Kristopher Waynant, chemist and lead researcher of the study, said in a press conference. But they’re not in the right form or quantity to have a clear benefit. “There’s positive effects from drinking beer,” he said, “but I don’t think that those positive effects are medicinal.” Thus, some chemical rejiggering is necessary.

Waynant and colleagues picked out humulone and lupulone because they’re the most well-established beneficial compounds in hops. Studies over the years have linked them to helping to prevent respiratory infections and blocking the spread of tumors. The first hint of their beneficial effects was noted by early brewers, who figured out that hops kept their brews from spoiling as well as offering complex, bitter flavors.

But the two compounds are bulky and complex, and they can be tricky to purify or make in lab. Humulone, a key alpha acid in hop flowers—the precursor chemicals that become isomerized during brewing to give beer bitter flavors—can blend into several chemical relatives. Less is known about lupulone, a beta acid, but it’s characterized by having two organic chains dangling from a single carbon in its central ring (double prenylation at C-6).

Many studies in the past simply used hop extracts to collect humulone and lupulone for experiments—an imperfect and unstandardized approach. Waynant and colleagues set out to make a fixed recipe for making uniform, synthetic versions, which could then be tweaked. They’ve come up with that synthesis protocol—building on synthetic chemistry breakthrough—and they're working out steps to add and modify chemical ornaments on the structures. Next they’ll create a large library of similar chemicals that researchers can flip through to find the most potent drugs.

While the two well-established hop chemicals get optimized, researchers in Italy analyzed Cascade hops to look for more useful chemicals. Using nuclear magnetic resonance, the researchers discovered three never-before-identified compounds in the buds. One of which, 4-hydroxycolupulone, could inhibit a pro-inflammatory enzyme from humans. The researchers are hopeful that the data can provide useful new chemicals to test and tweak for the development of new drugs.

Journal of Natural Products, 2015. DOI: 10.1021/acs.jnatprod.5b01052 (About DOIs).