Bringing a fine chemical product to market quickly and profitably requires efficient and cost-effective processes for preparing large amounts of the target compound and the intermediates. The key to rapid and successful process development is avoiding scale-up problems. However, an understanding of scale-up issues is rarely taught in academia and may take years of industrial experience to acquire.

Practical Process Research & Development teaches how to anticipate and avoid problems associated with scale-up from the research lab or pilot plant to full production. The approach is pragmatic, with a minimum of theory and over 100 practical scale-up tips. Many tables and detailed reaction schemes allow the reader to identify critical processing steps quickly.

From the Preface: “My goal with this book is to provide a comprehensive, step-by-step, hands-on approach to organic process research and development for the preparation of ‘small molecules.’...This book has been developed primarily from my experiences at Bristol-Myers-Squibb. The principles discussed are illustrated by examples from the chemical literature, patents, and my personal experience in the laboratory, pilot plants, and manufacturing plants...”

From the Foreword by K. Barry Sharpless: “...Neal Anderson, one of the outstanding practitioners of pharmaceutical process research and development, has given us here the best text ever written on the subject [of process R & D]...”

Target Audience: Novice and experienced process chemists and chemical engineers; especially valuable for anyone entering process chemistry from a classical organic chemistry background; it is also a superb text for students of process chemistry.

Table of Contents:

Approaches to Process Devlopment

Route Selection

Reagent Selection

Solvent Selection

Running the Reaction

Effects of Water

In-Process Controls

Optimizing the Reaction by Minimizing Impurities

Optimizing Catalytic Reactions

Work-up

Tools for Purifying the Product: Column Chromatography, Crystallization, and Reslurrying

Final Product Form and Impurity Considerations

Vessels and Mixing

Preparing for and Implementing the Scale-up Run

Troubleshooting

Chiral Synthesis

Index