Editorial pubs.acs.org/OPRD
Process Chemistry Awards
A
ll of the various national chemical societies, such as the American Chemical Society (ACS), Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), or Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh) to name just three, have awards/prizes/medals for all sorts of areas of chemistry, but how many have awards for process chemistry? None that I am aware of. In the United Kingdom there is an annual Process Chemistry Award which has been running since 2005. The intention of the award is to recognise work carried out by a UK-based academic in the development of significant new synthetic methodology with a level of fundamental understanding such that it has the potential to become a useful industrial manufacturing process. The award is sponsored jointly by AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and Syngenta, and together with Scientific Update they nominate candidates for the award, who are judged by a panel of representatives from each of the organisations. The winner of the award is invited to present their work at the SCI Process Development Symposium which is held in Cambridge, UK, each year, where they are also presented with the award and a cheque. The list of winners shown in the table covers a wide range of organic chemistry, with most being for synthetic chemistry, but the list also includes awards for physical organic chemistry and biocatalysis. Many organic chemists think that making the target compound is the goal. However, in process research and development (R&D) we know that a fundamental understanding of the chemistry is also critical to be able to develop safe, economic processes that will also satisfy all the various regulatory requirements (process validation, QbD, waste minimisation, and so forth), and that brings me back to one of the basic aims of the awardto stimulate academics to investigate and study areas of chemistry that are of interest to process R&D chemists. For example, there still is no general simple catalytic method for carrying out amide coupling despite the myriad number of methods available. However, despite not being a particularly “sexy” area of chemistry, amide coupling is being studied by quite a few academics across the world. There are other ways of influencing academic research, such as the ACS Green Chemistry Institute (GCI) Roundtable list of target methodologies and technologies for which research grants are awarded. Nevertheless, my question for those of you working outside the UK is this: Do you have similar awards? If not, I hope this will start some discussion and ultimately lead to action in every country where pharmaceutical/fine chemical process R&D is carried out. I can think of plenty of academics outside the UK who would be excellent candidates for the award but fall outside of our remit; thus, it is over to you, whoever you are, and wherever you may be. Recognise your “local” academic professor if he is doing work that is potentially useful to industry, and use this as a way to get other members of the academic community to look at some of the problems we face in process R&D. © 2014 American Chemical Society
year
current affiliation
winner
2005
Jonathan Williams
Bath
2006
Barry Lygo
Nottingham
2007 2008 2009 2010
Nick Turner Jianliang Xiao Varinder Aggarwal Guy Lloyd Jones
Manchester Liverpool Bristol Edinburgh
2011
Mike Greaney
Manchester
2012
Tim Donohoe
Oxford
2013
Kevin Booker-Milburn
Bristol
citation/topic borrowing hydrogen methodology asymmetric phase transfer catalysis biocatalysis organometallic methodology chiral chemistry fundamental understanding of catalytic processes C−H insertion and decarboxylative coupling reactions modern heterocyclic chemistry flow photochemistry
Will Watson
■
Scientific Update, Maycroft Place, Stone Cross Mayfield, East Sussex TN20 6EW, United Kingdom
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
E-mail: will@scientificupdate.co.uk Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
Published: February 26, 2014 359
dx.doi.org/10.1021/op500058g | Org. Process Res. Dev. 2014, 18, 359−359
