The importance of chirality (an object and
its mirror image) has constantly increased in the last decades and it is nowadays a central issue in organic and pharmaceutical
industry especially in the development of new drugs. In pharmaceutical industry, often only one enantiomer
of a racemic chiral drug is the effective agent and has a therapeutically useful action, while the second enantiomer
does not or may be less effective, totally ineffective, or in the worst case even toxic. Legislation now requires both enantiomers
of a racemic drug to be pharmacologically investigated.
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| Chirality: An object and its mirror image |
Our group has interest in the development of new chemical production routes and products that
consume less of the resources of nature and minimize risks on human health and our environment either during manufacturing
or during or after functional use of the chemicals. Our routes include non-conventional flash chemistry process where the
miniaturization of the catalytic reactions and chiral analysis are performed in integrated systems of micro-reactors for chiral
drug development and combinatorial approaches. Our approaches to access enantiomerically pure compounds include enzyme and
metal catalysis. This is followed by chiral analysis to assess the enantiomeric purity of the product using GC, HPLC and CE
equipped with new chiral stationary phases consisting of polymer and silica monolith.