Development of Asymmetric Hydrogenation Catalysts via High Throughput Experimentation

The dynamics of drugs discovery imposes severe time constraints on the development chemist in charge of implementing the large scale production of a new Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API). This results in the use of well-established and robust transformations at the expense of the cost-efficiency and the sustainability of the process. In order to cope with the short development time and allow the implementation of new more efficient production technologies such as asymmetric hydrogenation, we have turned towards the use of high throughput experimentation for the discovery of new catalysts. The protocol for the preparation of a library of chiral ligands and its application to real-life pharmaceutical molecules is described in this article