The Lab Notes

The brominative decarboxylation  reaction was demonstrated over a hundred and fifty years ago by Borodin (the famous composer, whose day job was as Professor of Organic Chemistry) and later developed by Hunsdiecker, whose name the reaction now bears. From an industrial viewpoint the transformation would be useful but the need to have a stoichiometric silver…

Phase-transfer catalyst or PTC is a catalyst that facilitates the migration of a reactant from one phase into another phase where reaction occurs. Phase-transfer catalysis is a special form of heterogeneous catalysis. Ionic reactants are often soluble in an aqueous phase but insoluble in an organic phase in the absence of the phase-transfer catalyst. The catalyst functions like a detergent for solubilizing…

Published in Green Chemistry in 2018 C. Oliver Kappe is our tutor on our Flow Chemistry course and this abstract was published in Green Chemistry showing a collaboration with Lonza in making an API in flow. Abstract: Fluoroform (CHF3) can be considered as an ideal reagent for difluoromethylation reactions. However, due to the low reactivity…

If you had suggested 10 years ago that it would be a good idea to try and develop some of the reactions that you can now carry out using photoredox catalysis, you would probably have been labelled as deluded, if you were not locked away for your own safety.  But photoredox catalysis has come a…

We had a fantastic turn out for our #OPRDUS18 Conference in Clearwater, Florida last month. It was great to see our speakers, exhibitors and attendees and the feedback we received was excellent. Thank you for coming along! Our Technical Director Dr Will Watson opened the conference and we invited Dr Paul Murray and Dr André de…

Where can DoE fit in process development? Are you using DoE to its full potential? A common misconception with experimental design in chemistry is that its use comes once a process had been planned and tested, just before commercialisation. In fact, DoE is arguably more useful at the start of a process for efficiently screening…

Listen to a discussion between Dr Trevor Laird and Dr Andrew Teasdale concerning Impurities. Listen to the Audio Interview by Clicking HERE.  

A recent survey suggested that out of all CMC topics the one at the forefront of many people’s minds and concerns is that of impurity control.  Why might that be the case? After all there is a strong framework provided by ICH in the form of ICH Q3A / Q3B (Impurities in drug substance and…

One of the disadvantages of Miyaura borylation is that normally a diboron ester, such as bis(pinacolato)diboron, needs to be used and the resultant coupled ester has to be hydrolysed to its corresponding acid. This leads to poor atom efficiency and longer processing times. Separating the pinacol waste from desired products can sometimes be challenging. A…

This perspective article, from workers at Imperial College London and Pfizer, Cambridge, reviews the literature on site-selectivity in S-M coupling reactions for a wide variety of heterocycles on a case-by-case basis. It is shown that experimental parameters can critically impact the dominant catalytic species in solution and its ability to undergo the site-selectivity determining oxidative…