IOCB / Industrial organic chemistry and biotechnology

FLOW CHEMISTRY & AUTOMATION

Bridging science and Industrial applications

Overview

Flow processes for pharmaceutical purpose gain increasing importance, and their development meets the guidelines of the regulatory agencies U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA). Advantages are that the desired product quality can be more easily ensured and that numbering up of flow modules enables an elegant increase of the production scale without facing scale up concerns. Examples in this field are related to chemo- and biocatalytic reactions, e.g., the current ONE-FLOW project.

Flow Chemistry

We pursue several different approaches to bring biocatalysis, organic synthesis and flow chemistry together in exciting novel flow processes. This includes the creation of homogeneous multi-step tandem flow cascades with fully compatible biocatalytic and chemo-catalytic steps. Alternatively, we aim to make non-compatible reactions working in flow by applying alternated segmented flow or Pickering emulsions, thus realizing processes that - by definition - cannot be performed in batch.

Automation

Besides using tools of flow chemistry for synthesis purposes, we also facilitate automation of such processes. Especially self-optimised synthesis offers great opportunities for process development in the future. With experts in this field we are currently bringing this enabling technology in our daily workflow.

Enzyme