Abstract

Flow Photochemistry as a Greener Approach for the Synthesis of Drugs and Drug-Like Scaffolds

Marcus Baumann, Assistant Professor, School of Chemistry, University College Dublin

This talk will highlight recent studies geared at the greener preparation of drugs and their building blocks exploiting photochemical approaches as the key step. The use of light to drive chemical reactions is highly attractive as photons are traceless reagent equivalents whose energy can be tuned via their wavelength. The presented studies exploit modern continuous flow reactor technology to overcome challenges commonly encountered with chemical synthesis such as safety, efficiency, and standardization. Moreover, we demonstrate how both known photochemical reactions as well as novel transformations can be developed and exploited in flow mode. The ability to use light-driven reactions for the generation of drugs and their precursors in tandem with continuous processing is a very attractive approach to generate these species at low cost, at various scales and with minimal amounts of chemical waste which contributes to modern sustainable chemistry.