From our mentor-by-literature Neal Anderson and his book "Practical Process Research and Development", a tip on using your analytical group to its fullest extent:
Often the analysis of a compound is best left to specialists. Analytical chemists may be very helpful in developing an in-process assay for the laboratory or pilot plant and in purifying an impurity. Quality control (QC) chemists may be key in recognizing a new impurity in a manufacturing batch. Spectroscopists know how to get the best performance from their instruments. Good teamwork among the analysts and other chemists is essential to the efficient development of a process.
To best support the efforts of analysts, thoroughly explain the nature of the reaction and the expected outcome of the analyses. Definitive results are generated more quickly when the analyst is enrolled in helping with a project.You can't have too many friends, especially when you're a process chemist.
Although most Syn/process jocks like to think they can develop and test materials on their own however once one has had the support of solid Analytical group realize how valuable such is for process development. Not to say don't still play around a bit as who wants to wait a hour for the fully detailed answer when can get sufficiently interpretable results in 15 min run time. Its much easier to tweak a good method than to fool yourself with a poor tool.
ReplyDeleteThis has changed greatly in the last few decades with HPLCs and GC/LCMSs being cheaper and more user-friendly but projects coming from med chem often were so poorly characterized (TLC & NMR "pure", IR-maybe) the first few months in development (process/analytical) brought many surprises (usually unpleasant).
CMCguy