A universal palladium precatalyst for efficient chemical synthesis of molecules and materials

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Catalysis is an enabling technology in chemical synthesis, providing the means to efficiently prepare new molecules and materials with applications ranging from solar energy harvesting to human health. Palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling is among the most powerful and widely used catalytic methods, particularly in industrial R&D to create new pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and organic materials. A significant challenge in applying palladium catalysis to synthesize complex molecular targets is identifying the appropriate combination of palladium source and supporting additives; industrial research groups will literally perform thousands of experiments to tackle this problem. A second major challenge is to achieve high chemical yield of the desired product on large scale while minimizing the cost of goods. For palladium catalyzed processes, this is often a delicate balance between maximizing efficiency and minimizing the catalyst amount.Our research group recently reported a robust and active family of palladium catalysts for achieving the formation of carbon-carbon, carbon-nitrogen, and carbon-oxygen bonds. This set of catalysts was designed specifically to enable and accelerate high-throughput screening for reaction discovery, and also to be user-friendly during scale-up and process optimization. This proposal seeks to bridge the divide between our fundamental, laboratory-scale insights to turn this discovery into a practical and commercialized solution for the synthesis and manufacture of new molecules and materials. Ultimately, this will help drive down the cost of medicines and green energy devices by reducing the cost of goods/manufacture.