Mark's flow organophotocatalytic N-CH3 late stage oxidation with moleculer O2 is published in Chem. Sci.
..and was selected for the outside back cover!
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The project, initiated by JPB during in the later years of his own Ph.D in GSK, began with the synthesis and discovery of 'DCAS' which was found to substantially outperform insoluble (brick dust) 'DCA', thanks to its enhanced solubility. But the project was parked at that time - the process safety department didn't like students handling O2 cylinders and we couldn't get enough O2 into the reaction despite efforts to boost the conversion beyond 50%. We did however know conform our reaction was starved of O2, thanks to on-line monitoring of the reaction with Vapourtec's unique transmission spectrometer Thanks to the excellent gas/liquid mixing of the unique microfluidic path of Corning Lab Photo Reactor, with an O2 cylinder plumbed in, our Mark was able to revive the project when we started up at Regensburg and his commendable efforts drove it to completion. Jonas supported with an improved, chromatography-free gram-scale DCAS catalyst synthesis. Ahmed supported with spectroscopic studies on radical anions. Ludwig supported with substrate syntheses. This was a highly collaborative effort: we thank our former collaborators Lee Edwards and Dr. Callum MacGregor at GSK for preliminary flow studies, we thank Prof. David Birch and Dr. Philip Yip for spectroscopic characterization of the novel catalyst vs. DCA, and we thank AK Heilmann for having our back with prep-HPLC purifications of functionalized polar drug molecules. Last but not least we thank Dr. Matthew P. John who is sadly no longer with us. An infectiously positive character, inspiring mentor and friend of JPB; ..he would've loved to see this manuscript online. Here's a picture of Matt with (a much skinnier) JPB:
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