Flow Chemistry vs Batch Processes

Chemical development is a time-consuming, expensive, and labor-intensive process. This results in a high environmental load and a long time-to-market for a drug molecule. As this could affect the viability and accessibility of the pharmaceutical product, the pharmaceutical companies are increasingly looking for quicker, cost effective, and safer process development handles with efficient production platforms. Traditionally, new chemicals are developed using batch processing, which fully relies on versatile and qualified equipment to perform different unit operations.

Scaling up of these unit operations requires judicious efforts of chemical engineers to implement lab-scale prototyping to bigger scale. The translation of work from laboratory to production environment has its own challenges and dimensions to make the process safe, environment friendly, and viable for commercial scale.

To address the above challenges, continuous flow chemistry technology is currently emerging as an effective tool to conduct chemical synthesis, both at the micro and mesoscale, providing an improved product quality with safe and environmentally conducive process in comparison to traditional batch synthesis.