The Catalysis Hub – Swiss CAT+, is a new infrastructure project funded by the ETH Domain, co-headed by EPFL and ETHZ.
Multistep automated pharmaceutical syntheses have been a long-term industrial goal. Automation not only enables the rapid and highly efficient preparation of organic compounds by eliminating the physical barriers, but also endow chemists with more time for critical thinking by relieving them from laborious work. With the growing demand for fast and efficient synthesis of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) for drug development, several efforts have been made in various subfields to improve the universality and capability of automation in multistep synthesis.
Despite numerous technical advances over the last century, the field of academic organic chemistry still relies heavily on manual labor and non-systematic experiment design.