Flow chemistry advanced in industry

Abstract

Flow chemistry has been steadily gaining ground in academia in recent years, and in 2017 the continuous chemical synthesis method—in which tubes and T-junction mixers replace the flasks and stir bars used for batch reactions—managed to make inroads in the pharmaceutical industry. One milestone: Chemists at Eli Lilly & Co. used continuous-flow chemistry as a safer, faster, and cheaper way to make the chemotherapy drug candidate prexasertib monolactate monohydrate. The Lilly team set up eight continuous process steps to make the compound. One step used hydrazine, a component of rocket fuel, which would have been too dangerous to use in a batch process. But perhaps the most notable part of this synthesis is that the Lilly chemists linked the final stages in the continuous manufacturing process to quality-control systems to achieve current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMPs) standards required by regulatory agencies for drug production (Science 2017, DOI: 10.1126/science.aan0745). Kevin P.