The COVID-19 post-apocalyptic laboratory

当前的COVID-19大流行暴露了加拿大明显无法有效地为其人口提供医疗应用所需的基本化合物。加拿大没有能力准备SARS-CoV-2疫苗和抗菌药物来治疗由此产生的肺部重复感染，这使所有加拿大人都很脆弱，我们的经济也在衰退。根据加拿大药物短缺，加拿大有15种基本药物严重短缺或停产；这对一个八国集团国家来说是不可接受的，并威胁到我们的安全。传统的药物分子合成使用的技术规模庞大，需要大量的反应器，需要数千万到数亿美元的资本投资。此外，一种关键药物的高级合成批次的失败可能会导致数十万至数百万美元的经营损失。考虑到加拿大相对较小的市场，加拿大企业很难有理由承担这样的风险。另一种策略是在流动反应器中合成这些珍贵的化合物，在任何一个时间点都可以制造少量的材料，但在较长的时间内连续和/或并行。这大大减少了资本投资，同时使流程更易于管理、更安全，并消除了代价高昂的批处理故障。COVID-19使人们关注工人的安全问题，并通过迫使化学公司轮班工作和其他降低现场工人密度的策略，极大地改变了化学公司的运营方式。流动化学技术，再加上人工智能（AI）和物联网（IoT），将使反应能够通过团队开发的机器人投料定制设计的流动反应器进行远程设置、监控和调整。这些成果将通过工人安全和预防服务（WSPS）的参与，在加拿大工业部门和医院的核医学部门广泛分享，这将大大提高工人的安全，并将有额外的好处，即为儿童、老人和重病患者的初级护理人员提供在这些有益领域工作的机会，使他们能够远程开展工作。

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.