The COVID-19 post-apocalyptic laboratory

目前的新冠肺炎疫情暴露了加拿大明显无法有效地向其民众提供医疗用途的必要化合物。加拿大没有能力准备SARS-CoV-2疫苗和抗菌药来治疗由此产生的肺部双重感染，这让所有加拿大人都变得脆弱，我们的经济也陷入了衰退。根据加拿大药品短缺的数据，加拿大有15种严重短缺或停止使用基本药物的情况；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是规模庞大的技术，使用的是需要数千万至数亿美元资本投资的大批量反应器。此外，关键药物的高级合成批次失败可能会导致数十万至数百万美元的运营损失。鉴于加拿大市场相对较小，加拿大企业很难提出承担此类风险的理由。另一种策略是在流动反应器中合成这些珍贵的化合物，在流动反应器中，在任何单个时间点都可以合成较少量的材料，但可以在更长的时间段内和/或并行地连续合成。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量故障。新冠肺炎将人们的注意力转向了工人安全，并通过迫使化工企业倒班和其他降低现场工人密度的策略，极大地改变了化工企业的运营方式。流动化学技术与人工智能(AI)和物联网(IoT)相结合，将使人们能够使用该团队正在开发的机器人供电的定制设计的流动反应器来远程设置、监测和调整反应。通过工人安全和预防服务(WSP)的参与，这些成果将在加拿大工业和医院的核医学部门广泛分享，这将极大地提高工人的安全，并将通过能够远程开展工作，为儿童、老年人和重病患者的初级护理人员提供在这些有回报的领域工作的机会。

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.