At Informex last week, we met with Nagase, the company that is commercializing the use of the Maruoka catalysts to perform asymmetric PTC reactions.
The synthesis of one of Maruoka’s asymmetric phase-transfer catalysts was patented earlier this month.
Nagase is reporting that they perform commercial scale PTC alkylations using the Maruoka catalysts to synthesize alpha-monosubstituted and alpha, alpha-disubstituted amino acids. This is especially useful to produce unnatural amino acids.
Maruoka started to patent these chiral phase-transfer catalysts in the late 1990’s and published several landmark papers in the early 2000’s. He wrote a review for the special PTC feature issue of Organic Process Research & Development in 2008 pages 679-687 (Marc Halpern served as guest editor).
The commercialization of the use of Maruoka’s catalyst is described in Nagase’s August 2012 bulletin. We can refer you to Nagase’s representatives in the US with whom we have an ongoing relationship since they hosted PTC Organics’ lecture tour in Japan in 2003.
Need to learn more about which phase-transfer catalyst to choose for a specific PTC application? Contact Marc Halpern of PTC Organics by E-mail.
About Marc Halpern
Dr. Halpern is founder and president of PTC Organics, Inc., the only company dedicated exclusively to developing low-cost high-performance green chemistry processes for the manufacture of organic chemicals using Phase Transfer Catalysis. Dr. Halpern has innovated PTC breakthroughs for pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, petrochemicals, monomers, polymers, flavors & fragrances, dyes & pigments and solvents. Dr. Halpern has provided PTC services on-site at more than 260 industrial process R&D departments in 37 countries and has helped chemical companies save > $200 million. Dr. Halpern co-authored five books including the best-selling “Phase-Transfer Catalysis: Fundamentals, Applications and Industrial Perspectives” and has presented the 2-day course “Practical Phase-Transfer Catalysis” at 50 locations in the US, Europe and Asia.
Dr. Halpern founded the journal “Industrial Phase-Transfer Catalysis” and “The PTC Tip of the Month” enjoyed by 2,100 qualified subscribers, now beyond 130 issues. In 2014, Dr. Halpern is celebrating his 30th year in the chemical industry, including serving as a process chemist at Dow Chemical, a supervisor of process chemistry at ICI, Director of R&D at Sybron Chemicals and founder and president of PTC Organics Inc. (15 years) and PTC Communications Inc. (20 years). Dr. Halpern also co-founded PTC Interface Inc. in 1989 and PTC Value Recovery Inc. in 1999. His academic breakthroughs include the PTC pKa Guidelines, the q-value for quat accessibility and he has achieved industrial PTC breakthroughs for a dozen strong base reactions as well as esterifications, transesterifications, epoxidations and chloromethylations plus contributed to more than 100 other industrial PTC process development projects.
Dr. Halpern has dedicated his adult life to his family and to phase-transfer catalysis (in that order!).
