Monitoring and Control of a Continuous Grignard Reaction for the Synthesis of an Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient Intermediate Using Inline NIR spectroscopy

Abstract

Inline near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has been used to monitor a continuous synthesis of an active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) intermediate by a Grignard alkylation reaction. The reaction between a ketone substrate and allylmagnesium chloride may form significant impurities with excess feeding of the Grignard reagent beyond the stoichiometric ratio. On the other hand, limiting this reagent would imply a loss in yield. Therefore, accurate dosing of the two reactants is essential. A feedforward–feedback control loop was conceived in order to maintain the reaction as closely as possible to the stoichiometric ratio, leading the path to full process automation. The feedback control loop relies on NIR transmission measurements performed in a flow cell where, in contrast to labor-intensive offline HPLC analytical methods, the whole reaction product can be scanned in real time without sample dilution. A robust PLS (projection to latent structures) model was developed with a satisfactory standard error of pr...