One pot chemical synthesis technique to be patented?

The industrial partner of academic researchers at Universiteit van Amsterdam and Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Synthon, has recently requested a patent for work on a one-pot chemical synthesis. This is the first patent to emerge from an ACTS research project.

In the synthesis, the researchers combined a chemical reaction step, a metal-catalysed conversion, with a biological step that uses enzymes. For this to work the reaction conditions, e.g. temperature and pH, must be optimised for both steps. To their surprise the researchers noted that the resulting one-pot synthesis eventually lead to faster reaction rates with a substantially higher yield, than the two separate reactions.