More efficient chemical process development is possible but it requires the addition to the team of someone with an unusual combination of bench experience, book learning, creativity, electronic search skills, and communication. This person acts as an assembler of the initial literature folio.
The method would work as follows:
As soon as a Process Development Project has been accepted all the client’s pertinent information is provided to the folio assembler. The longer the period between project acceptance and the planned start of the bench-work the better. The shorter the period, the more critical the assembler’s timeline becomes. The folio assembler works with the senior research chemist for the project. It is the folio assembler’s job to provide a stack of pertinent literature to the senior research chemist as quickly as possible of such a quality that after reading through it the senior research chemist will say, “The solution is obvious.”
The early bench work of junior team members should concentrate on the development of ‘in situ’ assays for product and starting materials and sometimes known impurities.
The senior research chemist, the folio assembler, and often other senior scientists conceive and rank possible synthetic routes.
By the time the actual process work begins at the bench, the senior research chemist has read a wide variety of articles pertinent to the various critical aspects of the process problem. Thus the early work period is not spent just keeping junior people busy or making mistakes that could have been avoided with basic literature familiarity. Once new pertinent literature examples become difficult to unearth, the folio assembler moves on to a different priority. Searching becomes more focussed once bench results start coming in and the Senior Research Chemist should decide what new information will address the problem.
This methodology will work efficiently because:
- Reliable chemical data is pains-taking to acquire at the bench.
- It is much faster to learn methodology from a publication than de novo.
- A comprehensive set of pertinent references would be useful as close to the beginning of the process development experiments as possible.
- Early experiments are usually poorly chosen and waste time
- It takes more time to find a key paper than to read it.
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