The Lab Notes

Written by John Studley - May 7th, 2024. As most process chemists know (but perhaps not so many discovery chemists) DMSO is nasty material. It undergoes explosive autocatalytic decomposition at or near its boiling point (189°C) generating non-condensable gases and concomitant extremely rapid pressure increases that can rupture a reactor vessel like a knife through…

Written by Jonathan Moseley - April 17th, 2024. No relation to the Madonna song, but rather the title of a book by Ed Conway, an economist and journalist, regarding the Material World in which we live. And if like me, you have a general interest in chemistry, as well as some interest in economics and…

Written by John Studley - March 19th, 2024. 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…

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…