Developing a challenging process: What happens when your catalyst is not commercially available?

For any industry involved in chemical manufacture – whether fine chemicals or pharmaceuticals – the development stage is arguably one of the most significant aspects to get right. It contributes significantly to both financial and time costs: drug development, for example, accounts for approximately two-thirds of the overall expenditure (1). However, it’s a crucial expense to get your innovations to market.
To lower your development costs, new methodologies are indispensable in overcoming any bottlenecks in your synthetic routes. One approach worth considering when evaluating and selecting potential routes is to incorporate catalytic steps. Catalysts can facilitate new routes incorporating for example cross-coupling reactions, giving you alternative and effective ways to access your target compounds in fewer steps. Streamlining your process in this manner can contribute to reduced costs and shorter project timelines.
Although catalysts can benefit your product development, they can be a hindrance too. Here we examine what happens if you are unable to obtain commercial scale quantities of your optimal catalyst, and possible solutions to get you back on track.

THE SCALE OF THE SETBACK, AND YOUR SOLUTIONS

Catalysts are a highly versatile addition to process development. In an ideal scenario, only low catalyst loadings would be required for your reaction to go to completion. They are also extremely amenable to optimization: by tweaking the ligand structure and functionality, you can fine-tune the properties of the catalyst electronically and/or sterically, depending on your requirements.
Countless combinations of ligands and metal catalysts mean that you can utilize large screening libraries to identify the best catalyst and/or ligand for your process. Screening libraries are vital to find conditions that are cost effective, quick, and environmentally friendly for your product synthesis. Unfortunately, finding the optimal catalyst for your reaction doesn’t mean your project will continue to run smoothly. The vast number of catalysts and ligands available can cause issues: your preferred catalyst may not be commercially available for your development team to use if there has been no previous general demand from the industrial chemistry community for this particular catalyst.

Although not being able to obtain larger-than-gram quantities of your chosen catalyst can abruptly halt your project, there are some options available: