Lecture: 'Advancing C‐H Borilations and Green Chemistry Through Academic‐Industrial Collaborations'

Ir-catalyzed C–H borylations can eliminate the need for halogens, alkyllithiums, and/or cryogenic conditions for the syntheses of cross-coupling partners. Moreover, their chemeoselectivity and atom economy allows for the combination of catalytic borylations with subsequent chemical events. Given the prominent role cross-couplings play in the preparation of pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and organic electronic materials, industry has shown considerable interest in such C–H activation processes. Indeed, the Pharmaceutical Roundtable of the American Chemical Society’s Green Chemistry Institute deemed cross-couplings that avoid haloaromatics as one of their top aspirational reactions.

With this in mind, my collaborator Mitch Smith and I teamed up with Merck to advance Ir-catalyzed C–H borylations and eliminate the need for halogens in both electrophilic and nucleophilic cross-coupling partners. We are also working with Dow to overcome other barriers to this chemistry being broadly adopted by industry. This talk will describe the research that led to these collaborations and how working to make C–H borylations industrially viable is helping advance our "academic" understanding of the chemistry.

About

Robert E. Maleczka, Jr. is a Professor of Chemistry at Michigan State University. He received a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Illinois, and then spent three years in the anti-infective discovery group at Abbott Laboratories, before undertaking graduate studies at the Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. under the direction of Leo Paquette and then moved to the University of Pennsylvania as an American Cancer Society post-doctoral fellow in the laboratories of Amos Smith.

In 1995, he began his independent career at MSU as an assistant professor. He moved up the ranks, being promoted to associate professor in 2001, full professor in 2006, and being named Department Chair in 2010. The Maleczka group’s research interests include the invention of “green” reactions for organic synthesis and the total synthesis of natural products.

Honors bestowed on Professor Maleczka include being named an American Chemical Society Fellow, the Merck Technology Collaboration Award, the EPA’s 2008 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award, the Astellas USA Foundation Faculty Award, the Novartis Lecturer title at Yale University, and Mentor of the Year award from the MSU Chapter of the National Society for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE). In 2006, Professor Maleczka and his collaborator Professor Milton “Mitch” Smith co-founded BoroPharm, Inc. a Michigan-based company dedicated to the preparation and commercialization of novel building blocks for pharmaceutical syntheses. Professor Maleczka is an active member of the profession. Among his service and outreach roles, he has served as a Diversity Scholar in the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning, as an invited participant ACS/EPA Green Chemistry Market Roundtable and White House Forum, as a member and Chair of the ACS Award for Affordable Green Chemistry Selection Committee, as an elected member of the Executive Committee of the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry, and was recently named to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Chemical Sciences Roundtable (CSR).