New Research Association for the Production of Drugs and Pesticides
02.11.2016 -
NEW SEPARATION PROCESSES FOR THE PRODUCTION OF DRUGS AND PESTICIDES
Four million euros for a top European research project to obtain pharmaceutically active ingredients. Scientists from the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg will develop new processes for the production of drugs and pesticides over the next three years.
As part of a research project called Continuous Resolution and Deracemization of Chiral Compounds by Crystallization (CORE) financed with 4 million euros by the European Union, they are working together with colleagues from Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Germany as well as globally active industrial partners to develop exploitable methods for the separation of synthetic molecules, or so-called enantiomers.
These molecules, which are present in pairs, are very difficult to separate from each other due to their similarity. “You can imagine them like our two hands, which are built as mirror images of each other,” says the Head of the Chair of Chemical Process Engineering and the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Seidel-Morgenstern. “The fact that living matter on our planet is assembled with only one of the two possible forms of amino acids, namely L-amino acids, makes the preparation of enantiomerically pure substances greatly important for the pharmaceutical industry and also increasingly important for agrochemistry.”
The simultaneous administration of both mirrored pieces of the thalidomide molecule as an active ingredient in Contergan was the cause for birth defects in numerous newborns in the 1960s, Seidel-Morgenstern says. Novel possibilities in efficient molecule separation are to be found with the CORE project, in which the undesired yet also valuable counterpart may simultaneously be recovered in a resource-conserving manner.
“As part of this project, top european groups in this specialty area will intensively cooperate for the first time in order to be able to better solve the separation problems,” Seidel-Morgenstern states. “We are planning to be pioneers in this area on a worldwide scale.”
Aside from the still to be developed tools, the industry needs academically trained experts for the sustainable optimization and establishment of the procedures and processes required for the production of high-quality pharmaceutical products.
The Continuous Resolution and Deracemization of Chiral Compounds by Crystallization - CORE training network is supported by the EU Framework Program for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 over a four-year term. The coordinating university is the University of Strathclyde, UK. Prof. Andreas Seidel-Morgenstern and Prof. Heike Lorenz, Head of the crystallization group at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems, are involved in Magdeburg.
More information can be found under www.researchgate.net/project/CORE-European-Training-Network-on-Continuous-Resolution-and-Deracemization-of-Chiral-Compounds-by-Crystallization
Source: OvGU press release