Removal of Palladium from Pharmaceutical Process Chemistry Reactions

Project Summary/Abstract (30 Lines) Palladias will develop inexpensive and reusable sorbents that cost effectively remove palladium from the products of palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions. Palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions are among the most widely used reactions in pharmaceutical discovery. NIGMS has invested approximately $107 million in researching and developing palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions. This project addresses the NIGMS topic: “Synthetic chemistry to efficiently produce methods for molecules of biomedical significance.” Despite their versatility and power, these reactions are not widely used in pharmaceutical process chemistry to synthesize medicines on a production scale because of the difficulty of removing the palladium catalysts from the products of these reactions. Palladias proposes to use high throughput screening to generate chelating sorbents to remove residual palladium from a set of three common palladium-catalyzed reactions. Palladias has developed high-throughput screening technology to identify highly selective sorbents that selectively extract metals from complex matrices. This screening technology identifies selective sorbents from combinatorial libraries. Palladias will screen for palladium scavengers, and characterize the sorbents identified in this project for reusability, kinetics, and binding affinity.