FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | June 09, 2015

ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable awards University of Illinois at Chicago professor $100,000 grant for iron catalysis research

WASHINGTON, June 9, 2015—A University of Illinois at Chicago professor has received a grant for $100,000 from the ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable to help pursue his on research iron catalysis.  

Professor Neal Mankad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mankad was awarded this grant by the roundtable based on his submission titled “Bimetallic Approach to Iron-Catalyzed Coupling Reactions”.

This grant will support one to two years of research for Mankad and his team. The ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable proposed this research grant for Iron Catalysis because of the safety and sustainability concerns facing the pharmaceutical manufacturing and the lack of widespread, proven, and robust methods for catalytic iron-based coupling protocols.  The research supported by this grant will provide alternative conditions to commonly-employed metal-catalyzed coupling reactions or new coupling technologies that employ iron catalysts.

Juan Colberg, the Pharmaceutical Roundtable’s co-chair, stated “concerns associated with this type of technology in the pharmaceutical community have increased due to high cost, fluctuating global supply, human toxicity, and limited natural abundance of precious metals.”

Mankad stated, “as an academic scientist who does research of a fundamental nature almost exclusively, it is invaluable to me to direct those efforts towards areas of importance to industry.”

Since 2005, the ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable has given $1.7 million dollars in research grants to advance the sustainability profile of pharmaceutical processes using green chemistry techniques.

The ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable brings global industry leaders together to catalyze the beneficial implementation of green chemistry and engineering. Current members include Amgen, AstraZeneca, Boehringer-Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Codexis, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd., Eli Lilly and Company, F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd., GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co., Inc., Novartis, Pfizer Inc., Sanofi and ACS GCI.

The ACS Green Chemistry Institute®, a part of the American Chemical Society, is dedicated to catalyzing the implementation of green chemistry and engineering throughout the global chemistry enterprise.  The ACS GCI convenes industrial roundtables, holds an annual Green Chemistry & Engineering conference (gcande.org), and offers educational resources including grants, awards, webinars, and workshops—encouraging scientific innovations to solve environmental and human health issues facing our world today.

The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 158,401 members, ACS is the world’s largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

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