ACS GCI Pharmaceutical Roundtable awards $480,000 for green chemistry research

Eight researchers, from the US, Canada, and Europe, have been awarded grant funding from the American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute Pharmaceutical Roundtable. These grants support research to further green chemistry in pharmaceutical discovery, development, and manufacturing.

Receiving $80,000 grants for key research areas are Karthik Sankaranarayanan of Purdue University for research in computational planning of enzyme-catalyzed routes for greener small-molecule development; Reid Van Lehn at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for developing machine learning software to identify greener alternatives to halogenated solvents; Jeffrey Bode of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, for greener peptide synthesis focused on the semisynthetic preparation of incretins; and Andreas Dahlin of Chalmers University of Technology for reducing the environmental impact of oligonucleotides and peptides manufacturing by employing polymer brushes for purification processes.

Receiving $40,000 ignition grants for high-risk, high-reward projects were Liang Feng of Duke University to develop electrochemically controlled molecular pumps for oligopeptide synthesis; Bart Pieber of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria for iron-catalyzed carbon-carbon cross-couplings triggered by visible light; Yang Hai of the University of California, Santa Barbara, for greener D-amino acid synthesis using a biocatalytic platform; and Lucas Caire da Silva of McGill University for research into coacervate microreactors formed from biodegradable peptides for nickel-catalyzed cross-couplings in water.

To date, over $4 million in research funding has been awarded by the roundtable. The next request for proposals will be issued in the spring of 2025. For more information about the roundtable, visit www.acsgcipr.org.