Green-by-Design: Award-winning Innovations in Biocatalysis

Celebrate two stunning examples of green chemistry practices that provide solutions for environmental responsibility through reductions in waste, cost, and time of pharmaceutical manufacture as highlighted by the 2023 winners of the Peter J. Dunn Award. The 2023 winners include powerful teams from Bristol Myers Squibb and Merck who will share their innovative approaches that deliver transformative and sustainable science.

The development of efficient and sustainable syntheses of new clinical candidates is a differentiator regarding process development approaches for every pharmaceutical company, and sustainable approaches deliver both scientific and business superiority. Join Harshkumar Patel of BMS as he discusses the overall strategy and key-decisions that led to the development of an improved 3rd generation route to BMS-986278, a potent LPA1 antagonist. During this talk he will specifically highlight the discovery, scale-up and troubleshooting of an ERED/KRED biocatalytic cascade to enable installation of two exceptionally challenging stereocenters. In addition, the presentation will showcase metric-based decision-making coupled with chemical innovation.

Biocatalytic cascades at times may appear simple “on paper”, but their scale-up often requires exceptional development considerations encompassing co-factors and special process challenges related to physical characteristics. When coupled with protein engineering however, complex cascade transformations for process greenness can be realized with unparalleled specificity and selectivity. Join Matthew Winston of Merck as he discusses the commercial manufacturing route to the cyclic dinucleotide STING agonist MK-1454. During this presentation he will reveal how this biomimetic process leverages a kinase cascade and cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS) to introduce significant molecular complexity.

Meet The Experts

Harshkumar Patel, Principal Scientist, Bristol Myers Squibb

Matthew Winston, Principal Scientist, Merck

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