Reaxa heads UK manufacturing consortium
pharmafile | July 23, 2010 | News story | Manufacturing and Production | Reaxa, manufacturing
Catalyst specialist Reaxa will lead a consortium, backed by more than £700,000 ($1.1 million) in UK government funding, to develop cheaper, simpler and greener ways to manufacture pharmaceuticals.
The three-year CP-STAR project, which also includes pharmaceutical heavyweights Pfizer and AstraZeneca, and Cambridge and Leeds Universities, centres on developing improved ways of synthesising and purifying pharmaceutical molecules.
The idea is to immobilise homogenous metal catalysts to inert supports such as polymer beads which, according to the consortium, will enable more efficient processing through flow reactions and prevention of product contamination.
Homogenous catalysts are used widely to produce pharmaceuticals but are notoriously difficult to separate from the product. Using tethered catalysts is expected to have a number of benefits, including reducing the number of process and purification steps and making it possible to move towards a “more intensive, flow-based manufacturing process”.
It could also help to avoid the use of toxic alkylating agents in pharmaceutical syntheses and allow re-use of catalysts to lower both precious metal and solvent consumption, according to Reaxa.
“The project will contribute to precious metal catalysis potentially becoming recognised as a technology of choice for increasingly complex pharma process chemistry,” said Reaxa chief executive Dr Pete Jackson at the launch event for the consortium at AstraZeneca’s R&D facility in Loughborough, UK.
Using the tethered catalyst approach should “aid compliance with regulatory metal contamination requirements without costly and complex purification”, added Jackson.
Meanwhile, “enabling the re-use of catalysts would reduce catalyst and solvent consumption, dramatically cutting the process loss and waste burden,” he said.
The initial aim of the project is to take the CP-STAR technology through application trials in pharmaceutical manufacturing processes. Research by Reaxa and the two universities will be complemented with applications testing by Pfizer and AstraZeneca.
This is the second funding awarded to Reaxa by the UK government in the last 12 months. Last November the company received £146,000 from the Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA) to scale-up production of its EnCat nickel catalyst used for hydrogenation reactions.
Phil Taylor
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