Amping up the pharma lab

Abstract

Once considered a niche field, electrochemistry—using electricity to do chemical reactions like oxidation and reduction—has powered up over the past few years. Several high-profile reports touting electrochemistry and its potential as a tool for medicinal and pharmaceutical process chemistry are driving the shift. Researchers hope the technology will allow them to synthesize compounds that were difficult or impossible to make before and to do it in a more environmentally friendly way. Read on to learn how chemists in the drug industry are starting to experiment with electrochemistry to create new drug candidates and improve the synthesis of existing ones. Synthetic organic chemists are accustomed to pushing electrons around. They use reducing reagents to force electrons into molecules and oxidizing reagents to strip them out. But using electrons on their own as a tool to synthesize molecules—electrochemistry, in other words—has been a niche of just a few. That’s starting to change.