Abstract

Flow chemistry thus remains an exciting area of interdisciplinary research and future applications will highlight its success in creating modern chemical entities to meet tomorrow’s needs.

Since its advent in academia and the fine chemical industry in the early 2000s, continuous flow chemistry has matured into a powerful and widely applied technology that now routinely complements analogous batch processes. From assessing the responses in this year’s panel discussion, a number of trends continue from previous years whilst new themes appear.

As such it is clear that flow chemistry is frequently exploited by academic and industrial chemists when faced with hazardous chemical reactions, unstable intermediates, multiphasic systems (e.g. gas/liquid and liquid/solid) or transformations that can be expedited via telescoping. Most users thereby appreciate the value of commercial, ready-to-use flow reactor platforms, however, amongst industrial chemists (both big pharma and various CMO/CDMO) the ability to design and built customised flow skids is highlighted as a relevant feature to deliver scaled and fit-for-purpose flow processes.

A further trend that continues from previous reviews is that both users and customers wish to exploit flow technology to increase the sustainability of their chemical processes. Evidently, many c ...