UCS - Umicore Catalysis Symposium 2023

Umicore's second Catalysis Symposium took place in May 2023 in San Francisco, CA.

About 50 scientists from Bay Area pharma companies such as Genentech, Gilead and many other smaller biopharmas attended the technical presentations we had lined up for that day.

Prof Neufeldt, from Montana State University, opened the day with promising developments on the possibility to reliably achieve cross-coupling at the less reactive C-X bond of heteroarenes.

James Murray took over and reported the application of Reaction Progress Kinetic Analysis in the development of Amgen’s Sotorasib®.

Kyle Mack, from Genentech, further on described the optimization of enantioselective cross-coupling reactions using machine learning, while Haifeng Yang described new catalytic methods developed at Merck & Co, Inc. for late-stage tritiation of sp3 C-H bonds.

A great event to discuss and connect with scientist and leading experts!  

Solvias’ Achim Link then presented an example of catalyst screening and optimization work leading to an efficient asymmetric hydrogenation step at industrial scale.

Joshua Dunetz opened the final session with an interesting example of Sonogashira carbonylation in the synthesis of Gilead’s early-phase development drug candidate.

And Prof. Rovis, from Columbia University, closed the day with a review of his work to develop a suite of Os-based catalysts enabling low energy excitation photoredox catalysis.

Umicore’s Philip Wheeler has also taken this occasion to review the importance of metal catalysis in the development of a sustainable chemical process, and pointed out the additional value that can be saved by already planning within the process development the metal separation and recycling steps.

Some of the talks of this informative day could be recorded and will be available online soon.