The Lab Notes

In this post I’m highlighting a couple of papers that are essentially two sides of the same coin. As a process chemist, I’ll be the first to admit that the chemistry I’m about to describe is not going to end up in your manufacturing route any time soon, but as a former card-carrying medicinal chemist…

In George Orwell’s classic 1945 novella ‘Animal Farm’ the revolutionary livestock develop the slogan “Four legs good, two legs bad” to summarize their views on the farmer and other humans. As the novella progresses, we see that things cannot be simplified so readily, and so I was encouraged by the recent excellent article by Brianna…

The introduction of bromine into intermediates is a key transformation in the synthesis of pharmaceuticals and other high value materials, due to the reactivity and selectivity it offers for further transformation, over for example the generally cheaper, more common but less reactive chlorinated analogues. Bromine is commonly introduced by one of three reagents: bromine itself…

Organolithium reagents are powerful and ubiquitous intermediates used extensively in synthetic chemistry both in academic and industrial settings. The stability of these reagents often necessitates generation and rapid processing at cryogenic temperatures: some organolithium species are chemically or configurationally unstable at temperatures above -100°C. An example is the dichloromethyllithium anion generated during the Mattison homologation…

In December 2023 Nick Tyrell from ALMAC gave an interesting and timely presentation at our Winer Process Chemistry Conference in Liverpool, UK on the proposed EU ban of all per- and poly-fluorinated materials, including polymers and the fluorinating reagents we use routinely to introduce fluorine or fluorine-containing functional groups into complex molecules. The details of…

We spoke to chemists at different stages of their careers about their experiences of attending our ‘Chemical Development and Scale Up in the Fine Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries’ training course. Ben Littler  Ben told us that he had taken the 'Chem Dev' course twice as an early career process chemist!  Both courses were held as…

In my previous blog I referred to changes in learning models for industrial chemists described in an editorial in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry by Dean G. Brown on ‘Adapting to the Changing Landscape of Biotech-Driven Drug Discovery’ (DOI: 10.1021/acs.jmedchem.3c02035) that I discovered through Derek Lowe’s ‘In The Pipeline’ blog titled ‘The Current Industry Landscape’…

Derek Lowe’s ‘In The Pipeline’ blog titled ‘The Current Industry Landscape’ on 27 Nov 2023 alerted me to an excellent overview editorial in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry by Dean G. Brown on ‘Adapting to the Changing Landscape of Biotech-Driven Drug Discovery’ (DOI: 10.1021/acs.jmedchem.3c02035). One thing that struck me as I read both the blog…

If you are working in industry and are responsible for safety, how do you safely scale up a given chemical reaction? How do you tackle issues like heat transfer, gas release, exposure control, waste stream issues and more? The core of any process safety study is a correct description of both heat and gas release…

When I first started working as an industrial process chemist one of my more experienced colleagues told me that you can only really know how well a process performs until you run it on at least a 5 kg scale. I found that to be good advice but as I developed my skills in the…