Issue: July / August 2024

Flow chemistry is an increasingly being studied technology which offers many opportunities to enhance a broad range of chemical processes, offering a wide versatility in applications (1).
This section focuses on flow chemistry potential, featuring recent studies on several areas of application: from synthesis to scale-up, quality analysis and crystallization.
Abstracts from articles of interest were retrieved researching on scientific online resources, like Google Scholar and Pubmed, and the selection was made from year 2023 to year 2024 with the following keywords: flow chemistry applications, flow chemistry synthesis, flow chemistry scale-up, quality control continuous production, crystallization in continuous flow.

Flow chemistry continues to emerge as an ever-growing area for research, development and manufacturing of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) / High Potent Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (HPAPIs) within pharmaceutical and Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization (CDMO) industry. Although pharmaceutical industry still relies on multi-purpose batch or semi-batch reactors, the transition towards flow reactors and continuous manufacturing (CM) is more and more arising today. This significant interest arose from the possibility of accessing novel process windows and to explore new chemical reactions under conditions that are considered difficult (“forbidden chemistry”) or even impossible (“forgotten chemistry”) in conventional batch modality. This article discusses the advantages, as well as opportunities, of flow chemistry in today’s pharmaceutical sector. We will give an overview about a recent case study successfully achieved within Farmhispania Group (FHG), thus illustrating the potential of flow chemistry as a novel synthetic tool for development and cGMP manufacturing of new generation APIs / HPAPIs. Finally, some considerations on prospective future developments of flowchem research in the industry are briefly discussed.

The number of biocatalyzed reactions in the industrial context is growing rapidly together with our understanding on how we can maximize the enzyme productivity increasing catalyst efficiency and stability. Although biocatalysis is nowadays identified as a greener way to operate in chemistry, its incorporation in flow reactors has lately come up as a powerful tool to enhance process productivity, sustainability and selectivity. This opinion article aims at describing the recent advances of this technology and future developments allowing for efficient, smart and environmentally-friendly strategies for process optimization and large scale production.

Process intensification of biomanufacturing offers the promise of improved control and consistency along with more efficient production. Within the available process intensification scenarios, integrated continuous bioprocessing is an innovative approach facilitated through fully automated end-to-end platforms. A standardized approach to these platforms for the purification of monoclonal antibodies has been considered. However, the control of these platforms is not well understood, characterized, nor discussed. Here we discuss an easily scalable universal valving and pump control solution to facilitate such processes.