Developing sustainable routes to medicine and food - CDT for Sustainable Chemical Technologies

In close collaboration with our pharmaceutical and agrochemical partners, our research will bring us our essential medicines and food while reducing the impact on the environment.

Our research has developed new and sustainable routes to small organic molecules, essential for the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries. For example, catalytic meta C-H functionalisation has allowed us to synthesise difficult to access drug like cores that previously would have taken multiple transformations and generated large amounts of waste.

Research in our labs has also seen the development of catalytic transformations using abundant, low cost and non-toxic metals. We have recently synthesised three pharmaceuticals using copper catalysis to construct the key drug cores, proving that sustainable catalysts can effectively replace the heavily used yet dwindling Platinum Group metals.

“Historically the development of novel routes to small organic molecules has been performed without regard to sustainability. As a result, these processes can generate large amounts of chemical waste and use expensive, rare metals. By placing sustainability at the Centre of our methodology development we are able to design from first principles, atom-economical, low waste and abundant metal based catalytic transformations.” Professor Chris Frost

Key Research Papers

ACS Catal., 2016, 6, 5220.
Cat. Sci. Tech., 2016, 6, 7068.
ACS Cent. Sci., 2015, 1, 418.
Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2015, 54, 10944.
Chem. Commun., 2015, 51, 12807.
Org. Lett., 2014, 16, 5020.
J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2011, 133, 19298.