The agriculture industry needs new products that deliver enhanced crop protection with more favorable environmental and toxicological profiles at a time when there is a continuous loss of products through the development of resistance and a constant shift in pest pressure. Because of these dynamics, new agrochemical molecules are becoming more and more complex, requiring the need for efficient metal catalyzed reactions to make them. Industrial process chemists often utilize information gained from academic research on metal-catalyzed reactions, when designing novel synthetic routes to complex target molecules. Challenges exist for the process chemist to implement these metal-catalyzed reactions at the manufacturing scale. Some of these challenges include cost of the ligand and catalyst (metal), understanding the complex mechanism of these reactions to develop a robust scalable process, low yields and turnovers, in some cases, catalyst and ligand recovery and reuse, and removing transition metals from the product. This presentation will highlight process research and development needed to convert a transition metal-catalyzed coupling reaction into an economically feasible and robust manufacturing process for the production of kilogram quantities of complex products in high purity.

Metal catalyzed reactions: Transforming “discoveries” into “potential manufacturing processes” for agrochemical molecules

255th National Meeting (2018)

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