Vapourtec’s MD and founder Duncan Guthrie discusses the history and future of continuous flow in the latest issue of Speciality Chemicals Magazine. In the article entitled “A Journey from the Vapourtec Lab” [1], Duncan highlights key flow chemistry milestones and landmarks and how they’ve been reflected in Vapourtec’s own development.
Vapourtec’s success has been based on working closely with scientists, understanding their needs and creating solutions to translate new chemistries in to flow. As pioneers in the field, Vapourtec encountered multiple challenges that were overcome with innovative thinking.
Duncan commented: “Our ethos has always been to become the most flexible flow chemistry specialists in the marketplace and to enable virtually any chemistry with our systems. To achieve this, we listened to what scientists had to say, learnt from their experience and developed products to fit their needs. This is the reason why we developed a variety of pumps and reactors. By doing this, we could handle fuming reagents, organic solvents, gases and even slurries at a wide range of working pressures and temperatures.
“Thanks to the combination of types of reactors and pumps, Vapourtec systems are featured in more than 600 peer review papers covering everything from solid-phase peptide synthesis (CF-SPPS) to electrochemistry.
“The journey of flow chemistry still has a long way to run and Vapourtec is leading the charge by bringing automation to the next level. By implementing machine learning with our flow R-Series platforms, our customers can now take advantage of AI to optimise reactions. Our flow chemistry systems are becoming more autonomous which increases the productivity of any R&D lab.
“Non-thermally mediated chemistry is another growing area in flow. Thanks to our continuous innovation of new powerful UV sources and electrode materials, more chemistries are being developed in flow. One of our strengths in photochemistry is our widest range of available wavelengths (from 220 to 600 nm), and the ability to look into the photochemical reaction as it happens,” explained Duncan.
[1] D. Guthrie “A journey from the Vapourtec lab”, Specialty Chemicals magazine, June 2021
