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Anna Maria Papini in a special issue of the American Chemical Society magazines

celebrating women researchers active in the world, in organic chemistry

A study coordinated by Anna Maria Papini, professor of organic chemistry, has been included in the special online issue “Celebrating Women in Process Chemistry” with which the American Chemical Society magazines celebrate women who are protagonists of research in organic chemistry.

The work, published in "Organic Process Research & Development”, develops an innovative process for the synthesis of a peptide pharmaceutical active ingredient used in post-infarction treatment: the  Eptifibatide (”An Optimized Scalable Fully Automated Solid-Phase Microwave-Assisted cGMP-Ready process for the preparation of Eptifibatide” DOI: 10.1021/acs.oprd.0c00490).

This research is reported as a technology transfer model: it is the result of the PeptFarm joint laboratory, active from 2017 to 2020 thanks to the collaboration between the Interdepartmental Research Unit of Peptide named Protein Chemistry and Biology (PeptLab) of the University of Florence and FIS  - Fabbrica Italiana Sintetici Spa, manufacturer of active pharmaceutical ingredients. The joint laboratory was hosted at the Sciences Campus in Sesto Fiorentino at the MoD&LS site of the Expertise Centre RISE B, an infrastructure network for advanced services to innovative enterprises funded by the Tuscany Region.

Anna Maria Papini explains, “By the second half of the twentieth century scholars have understood that peptides, these biological macromolecules that are the basis of proteins and are produced by our organism, can be considered drugs and offer advantages, as they are derived from natural substances.  Over the years researchers have managed their production, using increasingly sophisticated synthetic methods. The current problem, to which our research responds, is the efficient transfer of these methods from small-scale production in the laboratory to industrial-scale production.”

The proposed technique – of which the PeptLab research unit has been a pioneer since the beginning of the years 2000s – is based on the use of a microwave reactor that not only allows to shorten the synthesis time, but, above all, increases the purity of the final product. The method has been optimized for synthesis on an industrial scale following the strict rules dictated by good manufacturing practices (GMP), indispensable for the production of pharmaceutical active ingredients.

Paolo Rovero, professor of pharmaceutical chemistry in the Department of Neurosciences, Psychology, Drug Research and Child Health (NeuroFarBa), and three young scholars in addition to the company's senior researchers, collaborated on the experience of the joint laboratory – which is a replicable model to obtain university research support to those who want to reach the market:  Annunziata D'Ercole is working on these issues at the Ph.D. School in Chemical Sciences; Lorenzo Pacini, research fellow of the NeuroFarBa Department,  and Giuseppina Sabatino, researcher of the National Research Council (CNR) Institute of Crystallography affiliated to the PeptLab research unit of the Department of Chemistry "Ugo Schiff".

Publication
date
18 March 2021
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