The Lab Notes

What does 2 + 2 make? The mathematician will say 4 The chemist will say between 3.95 and 4.05 The lawyer will want to know what their fee will be for providing the information The accountant will say the answer is 4, but I’m sure you can manage with 1.6 The engineer will say the…

GSK were one of the first companies to publish a solvent selection guide and they have updated this gradually over the years, with the latest version of their guide being published just recently in Green Chemistry1. The new guide contains 44 more solvents taking the total number of solvents covered to 154. In addition, the…

Another paper on the theme of solvents, is from Paul Murray working with the University College London and concerns the use of solvent maps and design of experiments (DoE). IN DoE solvent is usually considered to be a discrete or categorical variable, but by applying principle components analysis one can generate solvent maps so that solvent…

Louis Diorazio and co-workers at AstraZeneca recently published an article entitled “Toward a More Holistic Framework for Solvent Selection”, which describes the development of a solvent selection tool. Most solvent guides concentrate on Health and Environmental aspects of solvents, but where this new solvent selection tool differs is that it takes in to account issues…

At the recent 'Scale Up of Chemical Processes Conference' in Baveno, Italy, John Snoonian of Sunovion discussed the development and scale up of a manufacturing route to make a 5HT4 partial agonist containing a 1,2,4-oxadiazole ring. During route scouting studies on the synthesis of the benzopyrazole an interesting solvent effect was observed – see Scheme…

At the recent 'Scale Up of Chemical Processes Conference' in Baveno, Italy, Charles Papageorgiu of Eisai described the optimization of a borylation process to prepare boronic acid ML-826 (see Scheme 1). Scheme 1: Preparation of boronic acid ML-826 The original method using B2Pin2 and Pd(PPh3)2Cl2 as catalyst was extremely inefficient (9.25 day batch cycle time!)…

At the recent 'Scale Up of Chemical Processes Conference' in Baveno, Italy, Wim Dermaut from Agfa presented some case studies where problems have occurred as a result of reactive chemicals present in waste streams. In the first case study a drum containing a waste stream including diethylhydroxylamine exploded. The most likely cause was caustic present…