Fully-Integrated Continuous Flow Processes for Access to Forbidden Chemistries, New Reactivities and Sequential Complexity Generation

Sustainability and greatly improved chemical processes are driving the pace of change in chemical synthesis. As a community, we need to discover new reactions and new types of chemical reactivity that are cleaner and deliver new materials with desired functions. Furthermore, we need to substantially enhance the tools of the synthesis processes we use and move towards an integrated machine-assisted approach that will allow us to capture the most useful and emerging hardware devices and software developments. This required a radical change in our approach to molecule synthesis. By moving away from traditional batch mode operations for the synthesis of molecules to continuous flow processing many benefits can be gained and these lead to improved safety, lower solvent use and less waste. Our proposed research will demonstrate an approach that will address these needs directly as it focuses on advancing flow reactor technology and harnessing their unique features to solve contemporary chemistry problems. Using continuous flow reactor platforms we will make discoveries in new areas of chemistry following more sustainable and environmentally acceptable sequences leading to new products with wide ranging functional properties particularly useful for the healthcare marketplace. To do this we will also devise new machinery that will facilitate extended working regimes and will release talented individuals from routine scale-up and optimisation tasks. These concepts will lead to a cultural change in the current practice of molecular construction. In doing this, the work will have a long-term impact well beyond the initial research programme. The outcomes from this research should provide access to new types of material not possible from previous conventional approaches and could open up biomimetic pathways for further exploitation leading to new complexity generation methods.

The wider impact of what is proposed in this critical mass grant application will have very many long-term benefits way beyond the initial research. We have already demonstrated early success in the formation of a spin-out company, Reaxa, to explore some of the reaction clean-up and waste minimisation methods that we have invented en-route to developing flow chemistry methods.
We can also quantify and demonstrate direct benefits that accrue from the use of these new technologies such as lower solvent use by five times compared with traditional batch synthesis laboratories and generate 10x less waste. There is also massive recognisable savings in operator time through routine tasks and optimisation programmes being relegated to the new machines.
Society needs chemists to be more responsible for their actions. We need greater focus on more sustainable chemical practices to win the advocacy of research councils and our political masters. It is in the interests of all to provide improved environments in which we work. The innovative and creative new tools we propose will enhance the quality of life and improve working efficiencies by releasing people's capacity to think and plan more effectively and allow the machines to complete more mundane tasks.
Our group, we believe, has already demonstrated leadership in this area but we need appropriate investment to maintain our position. In hard economic times, it is the visionary thinking, which adds long-term value and not the short-term economics, which simply shifts manufacturing and discovery to less expensive countries.
What is clear from the research we have conducted in this general area over some years is that we can already see direct impact in the formation of UK based companies who are now developing equipment to serve this area of science. Our industry is beginning to impart these new methods and our group is acting as a technology transfer unit to facilitate knowledge transfer. We believe we are changing the culture of synthesis of functional materials for the betterment of all. The short-term gains are already obvious but the long-term benefits could have far reaching implications in training the next generation of scientists who will conform to a greater level of capability and responsibility.