A collection of candid case studies reveals how industrial chemists diagnose failures and redesign processes with clarity and purpose.
In industrial process chemistry, what doesn’t work can be just as informative as what does. Failed campaigns, unexpected impurities, or scale-up glitches often shape the decisions that drive robust, cost-efficient processes. All too often, however, these setbacks and their resulting insights remain internal. The new “Lessons Learned in Organic Process Chemistry” special issue from Organic Process Research & Development (OPR&D) flips that paradigm on its head by openly sharing case studies that focus on real-world challenges and the understandings they yield.
Contributions to this issue span practical topics that not only directly resonate with corporate R&D, but will also inspire new paths forward. For example, a Yamamoto and colleagues’ case report highlights scale-up complexities for a foundational cross-coupling reaction frequently used in pharmaceutical synthesis. Practical challenges and mitigations described provide actionable learnings that are otherwise hard to find in standard procedure reports. (And be sure to check out the related on-demand webinar for an even closer look at this case study.)
Other learnings from this special issue include a facility-level view on translating flow technology from concept to plant reality. There is a candid discussion of infrastructure, regulatory, and operational challenges encountered along the way. A study on mixing strategies in solid-phase synthesis delivers nuanced understanding of transport phenomena that influence reproducibility and product quality—something every process team wrestles with in complex syntheses. And another report details how an unforeseen impurity emerged during scale-up of a late-stage API intermediate process. Through extensive analytical work and retrosynthetic assessment, the development team identified the root cause and redesigned the sequence to eliminate it.
These kinds of analytical and strategic pivots, alongside several others featured in this issue, exemplify the sort of practical, high-impact lessons OPR&D aims to share. Many of the articles in this special issue are available as open access, ensuring broader cross-company visibility into “negative” results that would traditionally be siloed behind individual organizational walls.
Discover what you can glean for your own processes and teams from these lessons in failure by visiting the special issue.
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