SAFC Commercial has entered into a services agreement with CatScI Ltd., a UK-based catalysis company focused on maximizing yield, optimizing quality, reducing waste and minimizing chemical development costs through reaction understanding. SAFC customers will immediately benefit from the relationship through rapid access to new reactions, homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, biocatalysts, solvent selection and process development, in addition to metal removal, recovery and recycling services, said SAFC, a business unit of Sigma-Aldrich Corp.
The importance of catalysis to the pharmaceutical industry has steadily grown over the past two decades due to several interrelated factors: increasing regulatory requirements such as policies on single-enantiomer drugs and environmental protection; the pressure to reduce drug development cost and time; and the continued discovery of new practical catalysts from both academia and industry.
Approximately 90 percent of chemicals now require the use of catalytic processes in their manufacture. With chemical targets becoming more complex and the average number of transformations required to synthesize an active pharmaceutical ingredient continuing to climb and currently averaging 12 synthetic steps, industrial chemists look increasingly to employ catalysis to achieve concise and economical processes in R&D and production.
CatScI Ltd. employs a combination of computational, statistical and synthetic methods and advanced technology for the rational exploration of reaction space, with access to hundreds of different catalysts and extensive experience in the investigation of the influence of the many experimental parameters at play, according to SAFC.
For more information, visit www.sigma-aldrich.com/safc.
