A well-written experimental protocol is one of the hallmarks of good process chemistry that we teach at Scientific Update in our Chemical Development course, so in this blog I thought I’d highlight an excellent example recently published in an open-access article by Nicholas Isley and Fabrice Gallou from Novartis (Helv. Chim. Acta 2023, 106, e202300143,

I can’t begin to count the number of aryl boronic acids I’ve made and/or worked with over the years. These versatile intermediates will forever be part of the synthetic organic chemist’s toolbox. You would be hard pushed to find an organic chemist that hasn’t run a Suzuki- Miyaura cross coupling reaction at some stage in

Figure 1: Suzuki-Miyaura Coupling   It’s a reaction that most organic chemists have run at some stage in their careers and is almost certainly in the running for the most widely used C-C bond forming reaction. First reported in 1979, the Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling between an organoboron nucleophile and an aryl halide electrophile is still ubiquitous in

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

The Suzuki-Miyaura cross coupling reaction has been widely used in industry for C-C bond formation but has not successfully been applied to unactivated substrates such as amides and esters, in which the C-N and C-O bonds are cleaved. This recent report from scientists in Wroclaw (Poland), Beijing and New Jersey gets around the normally slow