News

Keynote Lecture at Chirality 2017; ISCD-29

Chirality 2017; 29th International Symposium on Chiral Discrimination (ISCD-29）was held at Waseda University International Conference Center on July 9-12. This international symposium emphasizes chirality aspects and had broad scientific precipitants from various disciplines such as physics, life science, and chemistry field including asymmetric synthesis, biocatalyst, chiral analysis, supramolecular chirality, chiral polymer, and chiral crystal etc. and had vigorous discussion. The symposium is held every year at various places in the world and this 29th time symposium was held in Japan in seven years; the last symposium in Japan was held in Sapporo. This year’s symposium had about 370 participants and had 82 lectures including 2 plenary by Nobel laureate, Prof. Jean-Pierre Sauvage and by the president of the chemical society of Japan, Prof. Hisashi Yamamoto, 6 keynote, 27 invited, and general ones and had 185 poster presentations.

Mitsuhisa Yamano of Chemical R&D Division of SPERA PHARMA presented a keynote lecture on “Catalytic Asymmetric Hydrogenation for Practical API Manufacturing Processes” focusing asymmetric hydrogenation among the chiral technologies taken over from Takeda. In the lecture he presented case studies on asymmetric hydrogenation which was applied to synthesis processes of chiral drugs developed in Takeda. In the case studies he emphasized importance of fine tuning of catalyst structure adapting to substrates in order to improve reactivity and stereoselectivity. He also introduced the synthesis methods of chiral ligands and novel chiral ligands, DTBM-BINAP, DADMP-BINAP etc. through the fine tuning study on chiral catalysts in Takeda.

The detail of the example of reducing chiral catalyst amount for asymmetric hydrogenation in the lecture was published on pp.432-440 in the special issue on “the front line of chirality research” in Journal of Synthetic Organic Chemistry, Japan Vol. 75 (2017) No. 5. SPERA PHARMA will provide the solution adapting to customer needs on various chiral technologies such as catalytic asymmetric reactions mainly asymmetric hydrogenation, enzyme reactions, diastereomeric salt technologies, and chiral column technologies.