Scientists at the University of California, Riverside, have announced a research breakthrough that they hope will facilitate a reduction in the end price of pharmaceutical drugs.

They have developed cyclic alkyl amino carbenes (CAACs), molecules which contain atoms allowing them to annex metals such as palladium, resulting in catalysed chemical transformations.

The carbenes modulate metallic properties in order to speed up reactions, and the discovery is the latest in a continuing pharmaceutical interest in carbenes, carbon atoms with six electrons instead of eight.

Lead author of the research, published in the Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Professor Guy Bertrand, said: "For more than a century, most catalysts were prepared using chemical compounds called phosphines.

"But in the 1990s, carbenes were found to be useful to make catalysts. The new carbenes we have prepared in the laboratory are such that they protect the metals to which they bind, making the metal catalysts more stable and longer lasting."

The drug industry is already increasingly utilising carbene-supported catalysts for chemical reactions during the manufacturing process, and this latest discovery has the potential to increase significantly the rate at which pharmaceutical firms can produce drugs on a large scale.


Ÿ Adfero Ltd