Friday, 1 August 2025 11:00am – 12:00pm

This seminar will be delivered in Lecture Theatre 4

Speaker: Professor Steve Bull

Host: Dr Constance Bailey

Title: Catalysis for the Large-Scale Synthesis of Commercially Important Platform Chemicals, Polymers and Drugs

Abstract
The first half of the talk will discuss how monoterpenes can be used as sustainable feedstocks whose unsaturated hydrocarbon skeletons are well suited for the industrial syntheses of chemicals that are currently made from non-renewable petrochemical feedstocks. This presentation will describe how catalytic processes can be used to establish a terpene based biorefinery for the synthesis of biorenewable versions of commercially important platform chemicals, polymers, insect repellents and drugs.^1-7

The second half of the talk will discuss the challenges overcome when scaling up a Buchwald-Hartwig C-N bond-forming reaction and a challenging Suzuki-Miyaura reaction that gave key aniline and biaryl intermediates that were used for the synthesis of multi-kilogram quantities of the Astra-Zeneca anti-cancer KRAS^G12C inhibitors AZ4625 and AZD4747 as anti-cancer drug candidates for clinical trials.

References:

1. Green Chem., 2021, 23, 597-610.
2. Green Chem., 2020, 22, 513-524.
3. Green Chem. 2021, 23, 5449-5455.
4. Chem. Eng. Sci., 2021, 247, 116938.
5. ACS Sus. Chem. Eng., 2021, 9, 8642-8652.
6. ChemSusChem 2023, 16, e202300670.
7. Adv. Sustain. Systems, 2021, 5, 2000292.

Bio
Steve obtained a BSc Joint Honours degree in Biochemistry and Chemistry from the University of Cardiff (Wales) in 1986 and a PhD in biocatalysis under the guidance of Dr David Kelly. He then carried out postdoctoral studies on natural product synthesis at the University of Queensland (Australia) working in collaboration with Dr Ray Carman. He returned to the UK in 1994 to take up a postdoctoral position with Professor Stephen G Davies on stereoselective synthesis at the University of Oxford. After a brief time working in the drug discovery companies Oxford Asymmetry and Oxford Combinatorial, developing asymmetric and combinatorial routes to chiral drug molecules, he took up a Lectureship at St Catherine’s College, Oxford (1998) where he continued his research working on a range of synthetic and sensing projects. He then moved to take up a fully independent Lectureship position at the University of Bath in 2001, progressing through the ranks before being appointed to a full Professorship in Organic Chemistry and Drug Discovery in 2016. After 20 years at Bath, Steve moved to Chemistry at the University of Leicester to take up the Head of School of role in 2023.