ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable Funds Eight Research Groups in 2021

[ACSGCI]

Eight research groups received a total of $300,000 in green chemistry funding from the ACS Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable (GCIPR) this fall. The 2021 funded research projects cover a variety of areas, including flow chemistry, greener peptide synthesis, medicinal chemistry, biocatalysis and others. New Request for Proposals in research areas that are important to the pharmaceutical industry are issued each spring. In total, the ACS GCIPR grant program has distributed over $3 million in green chemistry research funding since its inception. To find out more about the program, please visit: https://www.acsgcipr.org/advancing-research/

The 2021 awardees, who each receive $50,000 in research support, are:

Duncan BrowneDuncan Browne, Associate Professor of Organic Synthesis and Drug Discovery at the University College of London’s School of Pharmacy was selected for his research titled, “Learning to Extrude Chemical Reactions”. This research supports the Roundtable’s interest in implementing solutions to minimize the use of organic solvents in flow chemistry.

Malgorzata ChwatkoMalgorzata Chwatko, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Kentucky, will further the Roundtable’s initiative to develop strategies to enhance the greenness of peptide and peptide conjugate synthesis. Chwatko’s research is titled, “Improvement of Peptide Yield and Solvent Reuse via Membrane Enhanced Peptides Synthesis”.

Hans RenataHans Renata, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Scripps Research in Jupiter, Florida, received funding for his research titled, “Biocatalytic Synthesis of Challenging Noncanonical Amino Acids”. This research supports the Roundtable’s aim to further develop enzymes for scalable API manufacture.

Jennifer SchomakerJennifer Schomaker, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will address the medicinal chemistry team’s objective in overcoming practical challenges associated with the late-stage functionalization of pharmaceuticals with her research on “Tunable Catalytic C(sp³)-H Functionalization of Heterocyclic Scaffolds”.

Ignition Grants

The ignition grants fund novel research ideas that have the potential to provide sustainable solutions to chemistry and engineering problems in the industry. These smaller $25,000 grants are useful as seed funding to obtain preliminary results and enable further funding opportunities.

Qiu Wang, the Robert R. & Katherine B. Penn Associate Professor of Chemistry at Duke University received ignition funding for her research, “Copper-Catalyzed Carbon-Carbon Coupling of Alcohols and Alkenes.”	Qui Wang
Associate Professor Han Sen Soo at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore will be researching “Photocatalytic Carbon-Carbon Bond Activation and Functionalization to Access Unnatural α-Amino Acids.”	Han Sen Soo
Mélanie Hall, Assistant Professor of Sustainable Bioorganic Synthetic Chemistry at the University of Graz, Austria, received funding for her research, entitled, “Enzymatic nitration strategies for the biocatalytic synthesis of nitrogen containing molecules.”	Mélanie Hall
Prof. Florian Hollfelder of the University of Cambridge will be “Exploring fitness landscapes of enzymes for chiral synthesis.”	Florian Hollfelder