Despite often being presented as a monolith, there’s a huge variety of activities, working practices and reaction scales across industrial research
Several years ago I attended my first official industry/academia collaboration event as an early career industry member. I was excited as it was my first business meeting. However, when an academic asked me of their research direction, ‘but what does industry want?’, I couldn’t provide a satisfying answer.
Perhaps I should have asked them to explain what they meant by industry. Within my sphere of recognition stood representatives from pharmaceutical companies, contract research organisations and fine chemical manufacturers. Beyond us, start-ups, food science, AI-led biotechs and many more industries also represent the organic laboratory-based section of ‘industry’. Even within pharma alone, the breadth of chemistries is staggering. I have worked in synthesis, enabling technologies, and chemistry data within both discovery and process chemistry. My training only lies in synthetic chemistry and catalysis, and even with that small scope I have experienced lots of variety. I had also previously been taught that any industry jobs were boring and generally involved grunt work – until I ended up in one and saw how rapidly falsifiable that kind of statement is.
Likewise, I have heard academics argue against publishing glovebox chemistry because ‘the industry will never use it’. I set up the vast majority of my reactions over my industrial career in a glovebox: it winds up being the most sensible thing to do when you want fast, reliable, parallel reactions without the bother of oxygen. It tends to work well because most medicinal chemists will use Schlenk technique where they suspect water and oxygen might be a concern, and process chemists generally avoid oxygen due to the fire risk.
Weighing up scale
A popular concept of industrial chemistry focuses on manufacturing, as eventually most companies’ goals are to scale up. However most industrial chemists work on small volume, including in synthetic chemistry. Most pharma chemists work in round-bottomed flasks and don’t need to strongly consider scaleup. The overwhelming drivers for a medicinal chemistry campaign are to move quickly, intelligently and effectively through chemical space. A good medicinal chemist employs expensive reagents, fancy starting materials and sometimes novel techniques because the cost of being slow is too high.
When I was lucky enough to work between both discovery and process chemistry at once, my plate-based, robot-enabled work differed enormously from colleagues’, even within the same lab. Experimental design on process projects was starkly different than for med chem – though still involved a lot of freedom, and all in 1ml vials. Knowing the productive regions of experimental space remains valuable when conditions aren’t perfect for scale.
And when batches are large, the differences between how industrial chemists work remain large too. I met a young petrochemist who raised an eyebrow when I mentioned the ‘huge’ scale of agrochemical manufacturing batches – one ton can be considered pilot scale – and replied that his typical batch size is an enormous 18,000 litres! The only other petrochemist I’ve met was on a delayed plane, each of us heading to different congresses. It took us several minutes to deconvolute our assumptions about the conference behaviour of each other’s fields. His involved series of multi-author conference papers that would be formally published as proceedings, with barely a keynote in sight. He was shocked to discover that synthetic chemists almost always give single-author presentations, and don’t bother to state them all on our CVs if we’ve presented a lot. It felt like we were from different worlds.
There are few limits at the lab scale
Despite the reality, I wasn’t entirely surprised when many of the young scientist audience in a non-academic careers symposium held a monolithic view of industry. Some feared that chemistries on huge scale and restrictions on reagents and solvents restrain one to ‘boring’ reactions. Not only are there few limits at the lab scale – probably fewer in pharma than most academic groups since cost is not a strong driver – but even on scaleup, necessary restrictions and guidelines drive innovation and cleverness. One delegate was horrified at the idea of running the same reaction a bajillion times to perfect it for manufacturing. I feel exactly the same: so, I have never worked in late-stage process design. And can we please get rid of this nonsense about rigid 9-to-5 schedules and getting told what to do by managers? That would be abhorrent to me, and so I have never done it. On the other hand, if something made me want a rigid schedule, I have the freedom to implement it tomorrow.
If you’re not already in industry, please stop taking everything you hear from that one industrial friend as advice for this fictional singular industry – including me, as I cannot speak for startup chemists, semiconductor makers, formulators, regulatory managers, sourcing experts, cosmetic chemists, or… anything other than myself and those I have worked closely with. The chemical industries – plural – contain multitudes.
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