Enantioselective catalysis in fine chemicals production Original Research Article

This review describes the state of the art for the application of enantioselective catalysts for the industrial production of enantiomerically enriched chiral fine chemicals. In a certain sense it is an up-date of an overview written by Scott 10 years ago . A comparison of the two articles reveals that certain aspects such as the difficulty to get precise information on industrial processes remained the same. As a consequence, many references relate to relatively informal sources such as C&EN, proceedings of commercial meetings and reviews. Other aspects, especially the state of the art in enantioselective catalysis but also the nature of the industrial players have changed significantly in the last decade. The present overview tries to cover all enantioselective catalytic processes that have been and/or still are used for the commercial manufacture of enantioenriched intermediates. In addition, we have also tried to get information on catalytic processes not (yet) used in actual production. Another goal of the review is to give the organic chemist working in process development an impression of the synthetic opportunities of enantioselective catalysis and to impart to the production manager some understanding of the potential problems when enantioselective processes are developed.