Pharmaceutical Process Chemistry

Process chemistry is arguably the area where most of the effort towards incorporating green chemistry has been achieved to date. Process chemistry involves development of practical, safe and cost effective processes for the synthesis of compounds selected to progress from research/discovery to a larger scale. Within the pharmaceutical industry, synthetic routes developed within medicinal chemistry often have to be completely redesigned by process chemists, and this is in part due to their differing requirements. The differences between medicinal and process chemistry and the multitude of factors that need to be taken into consideration when scaling up a chemical process are discussed in this module.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this module you should:

• Understand the differences and synergies between medicinal and process chemistry;
• Understand the factors affecting the scaling up of processes;
• Be able to describe the journey from research to process chemistry.