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Enabling Greener Pharma Manufacturing: Scaling a Photo-Flow Bromination for Belzutifan

ACS Webinars

The pharmaceutical industry makes products that improve millions of lives. Recent developments in flow chemistry can help alleviate the environmental burden of manufacturing processes to bring these products to market in a sustainable way.  Belzutifan (MK-6482) is an investigational selective inhibitor of hypoxia-inducible factor-2α (HIF-2α) that is being evaluated for the treatment of kidney cancer.

Join François Lévesque and Cecilia Bottecchia of Merck as they share how the synthetic route designed for belzutifan reduced step count, eliminated waste, improved efficiency, and solved critical safety and robustness issues. Discover why the key enabler for this achievement was reimagining how an efficient radical bromination reaction can be achieved through a photo-flow process on manufacturing scale. 

This ACS Webinar is moderated by John Tucker of Neurocrine Biosciencesand and co-produced with the ACS Green Chemistry Institute.

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What You Will Learn

  • How the improved manufacturing process for belzutifan, starting from a naturally occurring commodity raw material, enabled a reduction in the step count by half, and resulted in an improved yield and process mass intensity (PMI) reduction         
  • How a photochemical bromination in continuous-flow was developed and scaled-up to obviate hazardous thermal initiators, chlorinated solvents and impart exquisite reaction control to ensure robustness        
  • How the implementation of continuous flow chemistry can reduce the environmental impact of pharmaceutical process

Experts

François Lévesque
Principal Scientist,
Merck

Cecilia Bottecchia
Senior Scientist,
Merck

John Tucker
Executive Director, Chemical Development, CMC,
Neurocrine Biosciences

Co-Produced With

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