Sustainable Synthesis of the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient Atenolol in Deep Eutectic Solvents

Atenolol, one of the top five best-selling drugs in the world today used to treat angina and hypertension, and to reduce the risk of death after a heart attack, faces challenges in current synthetic methods to address inefficiencies and environmental concerns. The traditional synthesis of this drug involves a process that generates a large amount of waste and other by-products that need disposal. This study presents a one-pot DES-based sustainable protocol for synthesizing atenolol. The use of the DES allowed the entire process to be conducted with no need for additional bases or catalysts, in short reaction times, under mild conditions, and avoiding chromatographic purification. The overall yield of atenolol was 95%. The scalability of the process to gram-scale production was successfully demonstrated, emphasizing its potential in industrial applications. Finally, the 'greenness' evaluation, performed using the First Pass CHEM21 Metrics Toolkit, highlighted the superiority in terms of the atom economy, the reaction mass efficiency, and the overall process mass intensity of the DES-based synthesis compared with the already existing methods.

Solvent-Free Enzymatic Synthesis of Ethyl 3-Oxobutyrate Derivative: Characterization and Optimization of Reaction Condition

It was first found that porcine pancreatic lipase (PPL) could catalyze the Knoevenagel condensation of aromatic aldehydes and ethyl acetoacetate under solvent-free conditions in this paper. Under solvent-free conditions, the highest yield of PPL catalytic reaction was 99.38%, and the Z/E selectivity of the product was 3.93. In addition, the reaction conditions were optimized, and the factors affecting the product structure were studied.

The Application of Two-Phase Catalytic System in Enantioselective Separation of Racemic (R,S)-1-Phenylethanol

Kinetic resolution is one of the methods which allows obtaining enantiomerically pure compounds. In the study presented herein, enantioselective biotransformations of (R,S)-1-phenylethanol were performed with the use of various catalytic systems containing ionic liquids and n-heptane or toluene as a reaction medium, vinyl acetate or isopropenyl acetate as an acetylating agent, and lipases from Burkholderia cepacia or Candida rugosa. The conducted studies proved that the use of Burkholderia cepacia lipase, vinyl acetate, and n-heptane with [EMIM][BF4] allows obtaining enantiomerically pure 1-phenylethyl acetate, with the enantiomeric excess of products eep = 98.9%, conversion c = 40.1%, and high value of enantioselectivity E > 200. Additionally, the use of ionic liquids allowed us to reuse enzyme in 5 reaction cycles, ensuring the high operational stability of the protein.