Meet Our Catalysis Team

Pharmaron’s catalysis team is an energetic group quickly becoming our chemists’ best friends. This is because the group’s mission is to improve the working efficiency of chemists. And if there’s one thing our chemists want to have more of—it is time.

The team aims to optimize reaction conditions faster—specifically, catalytic reactions. By collaborating with chemists at all stages of the drug R&D process, their goal is to optimize catalytic transformations and, in the process, make them more efficient, reliable, and cost-effective. With an increasing collection of hundreds of catalysts and ligands and access to specialized screening equipment, including the 24/96-well parallel reactor (which requires less than one milligram of starting material), the group tackles challenges quickly. It provides results to chemists in just two days. These solutions can deliver compounds faster using more efficient processes with a higher probability of success.

The catalysis team has made a significant impact with increasing productivity across Pharmaron’s discovery and process chemistry departments. This results from the catalysis group’s extensive screening work, including Suzuki coupling, ?C-N coupling (Ullman, Buchwald coupling), C-H Borylation, photoredox, and other key reaction types in modern organic chemistry. Every month, the group carries out hundreds of reactions under thousands of conditions with an average success rate of around 50%.

Besides traditionally used metal catalysts, enzyme collections are becoming one of the most powerful tools in their screening work. There are many success stories for both discovery and process chemistry. A recent request from our process development and manufacturing (PDM) scientists was to find an efficient way to generate a chiral alcohol. The original method required chiral SFC separation of the corresponding racemate. Attempts using asymmetric reduction with different chiral metal catalysts gave the best result of 74% ee and 56% yield. The catalysis team screened over fifty ketoreductases and found an enzyme that could selectively generate the desired enantiomer in 98% ee and quantitative yield. This enabled the PDM group to generate the desired chiral alcohol in a large quantity by using a green and efficient biotransformation.

Since the team’s creation in 2016, great strides have been made to utilize their expertise. The chemistry departments regularly distribute a newsletter on new and valuable catalysts. Through a series of internal training seminars, key research topics are presented, including photoredox and electrochemical synthesis. The group is looking to expand its screening capacity by building a state-of-the-art automated screening platform.

As one can imagine, the catalysis group is busy, but that doesn’t diminish their enthusiasm. The team thrives on knowing that they can help their colleagues and our partners with their knowledge, tools, and expertise. “I love my job,” said Dr. Shi Li, Group Leader. “It’s a great feeling to make a a big impact on so many projects.”

Leadership

Dr. Shi Li leads the catalysis team. Dr. Li started working at Pharmaron in 2016. Before this, he was an Associate Professor at the State Key Laboratory of Organometallic Chemistry at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC) and received his post-doctoral fellowship at the Catalysis Research Center at Hokkaido University in Japan. The management team also includes Dr. Kexin Yang and Dr. Wenqiong Wu.

Updated August 2021