Professor Kevin Lam, Professor of Synthetic Electrochemistry and Head of the Centre for Synthesis, Materials, Analytics and Research in Translational Science at the University of Greenwich has led a research team that developed a practical way to use electricity to make the fluorinated chemical building blocks needed to produce medicines and a variety of materials. The experimental work was led by Feba T. Pulikkottil, with contributions from Daniel F. Carvalho, Kohei Taniguchi, John S. Burnett, Charles A. I. Goodall, Victoria K. Elmes, Andrew Hurt, Ewan R. Clark and Anthony J. H. M. Meijer.
Published in Nature Communications, this paper outlines the new process of using electricity as a more environmentally-friendly and practical alternative to traditional approaches.
Fluorine is widely used in modern drug discovery because it can influence how medicines behave in the body, including their stability, solubility and biological activity.
Nitrogen is also common in medicines and biologically active molecules but combining nitrogen-containing compounds with fluorinated groups in useful ways has traditionally been challenging. Existing methods often require several synthetic steps, expensive reagents such as silver fluoride, hazardous fluorinating chemicals, or specialist reagents that are not always commercially available. These limitations can make the chemistry difficult to scale up and less attractive for practical use.
Professor Kevin Lam and his team showed that electricity can be used to convert simple secondary amines - organic compounds containing carbon-nitrogen bonds - into three valuable classes of fluorinated compounds: N-trifluoromethyl amines, thiocarbamoyl fluorides and carbamoyl fluorides. The method avoids some of the expensive and hazardous reagents commonly associated with this type of chemistry. Instead, it uses commercially-available reagents and electricity as the driving force.
Importantly, the method is straightforward to use. It can be carried out under mild, open-air conditions, without the need for specialised preparation steps such as removing air from the reaction or drying solvents. Additionally, the process can be scaled up to produce larger quantities, an essential step for real-world applications beyond the lab.
The study is part of a broader research priority at the University of Greenwich focused on developing practical electrochemical methods for chemical synthesis.
Professor Kevin Lam said:
“Fluorine and nitrogen are both central to modern medicinal chemistry but putting them together in useful ways can still be challenging. In this work, we show that electricity can provide a practical and controllable way to access valuable, fluorinated nitrogen-containing building blocks from simple amines. The wider message is that electrochemistry can help make complex chemical synthesis cleaner, safer and more accessible.”
The research team is now working to expand the approach to other fluorinated compounds and further improve its usefulness for medicinal chemistry. Future efforts will focus on scaling up the process and adapting it to more advanced formats. It is likely to be significant interest to the pharmaceutical industry.
The research was led by the Faculty of Engineering and Science at the University of Greenwich, in collaboration with the Institute of Science Tokyo and the University of Sheffield.
