Vocabulary

Avantium

A high-tech, dynamic and exciting company that is specialized in high-throughput R&D. The company develops products and processes on basis of its unique technological capabilities, such as biomaterials and biofuels. Avantium has proven the value of its capabilities and expertise by successfully helping leading oil, chemical and pharmaceutical companies discover and develop new products and production processes. The name Avantium is derived from the Italian word "avanti" and stands for Forerunner. In Avantium's world of innovation and advanced R&D it is important always to be ahead.

API

Short for active pharmaceutical ingredient. It is the part of a drug that makes it cure a disease or relieve the symptoms of the disease.

Automated parallel reactor platform

A computer-controlled test-rig in which you can perform many chemical experiments at the same time in an automated fashion.

Batch reactor

A reaction vessel for carrying out batch experiments. Working in batch mode is a bit like cooking: you follow a recipe, and add everything in one pot, unlike a continuous system where you constantly add your ingredients on one side of a reactor while the end product flows out continuously on the other (see flow reactor).

Biofuels

Transportation fuels derived from biomass (biomass is the collective name for all plant material, including wheat, grass and wood). Biofuels are an alternative to normal transportation fuels such as gasoline and diesel, that are derived from oil.

Catalysis

A process can sometimes be improved by using a catalyst. In principle, this catalyst will do the job and can be recovered at the end of the reaction so it can be reused.

Catalyst

A catalyst is a chemical compound that accelerates a chemical reaction. You could compare a catalyst with a marriage broker; in chemistry, a catalyst facilitates the marriage of (i.e. the reaction between) two chemicals.

Catalyst library

A large collection of catalysts, and materials to make catalysts such as noble metals and support materials.

Cheminformatics

The science dealing with solving chemical problems, particularly trying to analyze and understand the huge amounts of data that our combinatorial chemistry generates.

Chemometrics

Chemometrics is the science of using mathematical and statistical methods to design experiments, and then understanding the results.

Clinical trials

Once a new drug is discovered, it has to be proven that it really works. Clinical trials are performed on people, typically in hospitals, where first of all healthy people get the new drug to see if there are any side-effects. This is called a Phase I trial. Then, in a Phase II trial, a small group of people suffering from the disease are given the drug to see if they get better after taking the drug. If all these tests are successful, a comprehensive Phase III trial will take place. In this trial, hundreds or even thousands of people suffering from the disease get the drug, while a large group of people also suffering from the disease get a dummy, which experts call a placebo. This looks and tastes exactly the same as the real drug, but doesn't contain an active ingredient. If this comprehensive clinical trial shows that patients treated with the real drug get better more often than the people who took the placebo, then the company inventing the drug can start making the drug generally available.

Combinatorial chemistry

Doing many chemical experiments in many reaction vessels at the same time. In this way, a large number of products with a different chemical composition are made in a highly efficient manner.

Crystallization

A process in which molecules are 'frozen' to make solid crystals. Ice, for example, is the result of the crystallization of water. Over 80% of all drugs are taken as tablets in which the active pharmaceutical ingredient is present as a solid; many companies try to perform crystallization on the drug molecules.

Crystal16®

This is an automated parallel reactor platform developed by Avantium to perform crystallization experiments.

DoE

Short for Design of Experiments: a statistical technique that helps in selecting process parameters that need to be investigated. This technique, in which a lot of conditions vary all at once, allows researchers to learn a lot more from experiments than they would if they were testing only one condition at a time.

Enantiomer

A complicated word for something very simple you know all about already: an enantiomer is one of the two possible mirror images of a chiral molecule (for example the left hand is an enantiomer of the right hand).

Flow reactor

A reactor where ingredients flow into one side of the vessel or tube, and where the reactor collects the end product continuously at the other side.

Formulation

A substance prepared according to a formula. Typically an active pharmaceutical ingredient in the dosage form as we take it, for example, a tablet.

Heterogeneous catalyst

A catalytic material, usually a solid that does not dissolve in the reaction medium (see catalysis). One catalyst we all know is found in the exhaust pipe of our cars where some of the more dangerous exhaust fumes like carbon monoxide are converted to less toxic fumes like carbon dioxide.

High-throughput experimentation

Performing chemical experiments using automated parallel reactor stations. The aim is to generate a large amount of experimental data in a very short time.

Homogeneous catalyst

A catalytic material (acid, base or transition metal complex) that is dissolved in the reaction medium (see catalysis).

IP stands for Intellectual Property. This is a very broad term describing legal rights to certain ideas, inventions, discoveries, experience, trade secrets and so on. Those rights may be worth a lot, so they are, in fact, property, and can be owned and traded. When experiments result in interesting inventions, companies usually try to protect these inventions by applying for a patent on the invention. Before carrying out a research project it's important to agree who will own the outcome. In other words, who gets to own the Intellectual Property on the results of the project.

Nanoflow

A reactor platform developed by Avantium with an array of flow reactors to study chemical reactions (gas phase and trickle flow). It has taken years to develop this platform to make sure that the results from experiments on the Nanoflow platform can be reproduced in large reactors in the installations of oil and chemical companies.

Polymorph

A specific crystal form of a solid. Many solids exist in several polymorphs, meaning that a compound with the same chemical structure may exist in different crystal forms. The interesting thing about polymorphs is that (pharmaceutical) companies can apply for a patent on a polymorph. If the polymorph patent is granted, the (pharmaceutical) company will own the exclusive rights on the crystal form for a certain period of time.

QSPR

A Quantitative Structure Property Relationship (QSPR) is a difficult way of saying that one tries to predict the performance of a new molecule, drug or formulation without having to perform an actual experiment.

Rational design

A very smart and efficient manner to design the experiments carried out in process research and development. Just like fishermen using radar to find shoals of fish in the open sea, Avantium uses its own radar (based on computer simulations) to find out where some process may work and where researchers should look when doing experiments.

Reactor

A reactor is a vessel, container or tube in which a chemical reaction takes place, for example a cooking pot, or the catalyst block in the car exhaust.

Salt forms

Sometimes when companies develop the new drugs, the active pharmaceutical ingredient is not very stable. It may melt too easily, or fall apart when there is a change in relative humidity. So some companies try to combine the active pharmaceutical ingredient molecule with another component to create a stronger 'combination molecule', typically a salt form, that will not melt or decompose, and that can easily be made into a formulation. Typical salt forms are prepared with sodium, hydrochloric acid, acetic acid, etcetera.

Scale up

The process by which a laboratory scale process is developed into a safe and reproducible production process on a much larger scale. Avantium performs experiments at small scales down to 20 microlitres. For example, one glass of milk contains 12,500 portions this size.

Small molecules

The term small molecules typically refers to everything that can be made (using chemistry) in the laboratories. Many new drug candidates are small molecules. Examples of large molecules are proteins and antibodies. These are typically extracted from biological materials or produced using cell cultures.

Trickle flow reactor

A reaction tube for flow reactions in which reagents in the gas phase and reagents in the liquid phase are reacted by passing them over a solid catalytic material.

XRPD

Short for X-Ray Powder Diffraction. This is the best analytical technique for analyzing crystals because each crystal has its own X-ray powder pattern, a bit like a fingerprint.

YXY

A technology platform, developed by Avantium, to produce green buidling blocks for materials and fuels.