The COVID-19 post-apocalyptic laboratory

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The current COVID-19 pandemic has exposed Canada's glaring inability to effectively supply its population with essential compounds for medical applications. Canada's incapacity to prepare a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine and anti-bacterials to treat the resultant lung superinfections, have left all Canadians vulnerable and our economy languishing. According to Drug Shortages Canada, there 15 critical shortages or discontinuations of essential medications in Canada; this is unacceptable for a G8 nation and threatens our security. Conventional synthesis of drug molecules uses technologies that are vast in scale employing large batch reactors that require tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in capital investments. Further, the failure of an advanced-stage synthetic batch for a critical drug can cause an operating loss of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. It is hard for Canadian business to build a case to take on such risks given the comparatively small market in Canada. An alternative strategy is to synthesize these precious compounds in flow reactors where smaller amounts of material are made at any single point in time, but continuously over longer periods of time and/or in parallel. This dramatically reduces capital investment, while making processes more manageable, safer, and eliminating costly batch failures. COVID-19 turned the spotlight on worker safety and dramatically altered the way that chemical companies operate by forcing them into shiftwork and other strategies to lower the density of workers on site. Flow chemistry technology, coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) and internet of things (IoT) will enable reactions to be set up, monitored, and tweaked remotely using robotically-fed custom-designed flow reactors being developed by the Team. These results will shared widely across Canadian industry and nuclear-medicine departments in hospitals through the involvement of Worker Safety and Prevention Services (WSPS), which will dramatically improve worker safety and would have the additional benefit of offering primary care-caregivers of children, the elderly and the seriously ill an opportunity to work in these rewarding areas by being able to conduct their work remotely.