Fully-Integrated Continuous Flow Processes for Access to Forbidden Chemistries, New Reactivities and Sequential Complexity Generation

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Sustainability and greatly improved chemical processes are driving the pace of change in chemical synthesis. As a community, we need to discover new reactions and new types of chemical reactivity that are cleaner and deliver new materials with desired functions. Furthermore, we need to substantially enhance the tools of the synthesis processes we use and move towards an integrated machine-assisted approach that will allow us to capture the most useful and emerging hardware devices and software developments. This required a radical change in our approach to molecule synthesis. By moving away from traditional batch mode operations for the synthesis of molecules to continuous flow processing many benefits can be gained and these lead to improved safety, lower solvent use and less waste. Our proposed research will demonstrate an approach that will address these needs directly as it focuses on advancing flow reactor technology and harnessing their unique features to solve contemporary chemistry problems. Using continuous flow reactor platforms we will make discoveries in new areas of chemistry following more sustainable and environmentally acceptable sequences leading to new products with wide ranging functional properties particularly useful for the healthcare marketplace. To do this we will also devise new machinery that will facilitate extended working regimes and will release talented individuals from routine scale-up and optimisation tasks. These concepts will lead to a cultural change in the current practice of molecular construction. In doing this, the work will have a long-term impact well beyond the initial research programme. The outcomes from this research should provide access to new types of material not possible from previous conventional approaches and could open up biomimetic pathways for further exploitation leading to new complexity generation methods.