New Metal Complex Catalysts for the Manufacture of Chiral Life Science Molecules

• Research unit: INNOSUISSE
• Project number: 8407.1;6 LSPP-LS

Short description (English)

New Metal Complex Catalysts for the Manufacture of Chiral Life Science Molecules

Abstract (English)

The goal of this KTI Project is the design and development of novel catalytically active chiral metal complex catalysts. The catalysts must be patentable, competitive with respect to costs / performance and will be (a) added to the commercial product line of Solvias and sold either as physical products or as IP (b) used in customer projects and (c) used for the preparation of selected chiral intermediates and products.Solvias has been active in the field of asymmetric catalysis (mainly hydrogenation) since its foundation in 1999. Two first KTI projects that focussed on the design and synthesis of new chiral ligands were of eminent importance to help Solvias to become one of today¿s leading suppliers of chiral ligands and to develop a ligand platform which attracts customers for ligand / catalyst screening and catalysis process development. However, in the next decade several important chiral ligands will become commodities. As a consequence the ligand business will become much more competitive and it will become increasingly important to prepare new, low cost catalysts with excellent performance. It is interesting to note that most of today¿s hydrogenation catalysts are prepared by reacting ligands with a relatively small number of classical and highly expensive Rh, Ir or Ru metal precursors and that only very little efforts have been made in the field of metal complex chemistry. As a consequence, there are excellent chances that combinations of new metal precursors with known and with uncommon ligands will lead to catalysts that outperform the present state of the art and open up chemistries hitherto unknown to work with traditional metal ligand combinations.To develop new, low cost, high performing catalysts, Solvias will tightly link metal complex chemistry (mainly group of Prof. A.Togni) with ligand synthesis (mainly group of Prof. A. Pfaltz and Solvias) and high throughput screening (mainly Solvias) in this new KTI project.