A perspective on automated advanced continuous flow manufacturing units for the upgrading of biobased chemicals toward pharmaceuticals.

Biomass is a renewable, almost infinite reservoir of a large diversity of highly functionalized chemicals. The conversion of biomass toward biobased platform molecules through biorefineries generally still lacks economic viability. Profitability could be enhanced through the development of new market opportunities for these biobased platform chemicals.

Automated radiosynthesis of the Pittsburg compound-B using a commercial synthesizer.

Background: The Pittsburgh compound-B ([11C]PIB) is a highly interesting radiotracer for imaging amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's disease by positron emission tomography (PET). An increasing number of PET centres schedule its transfer for clinical studies and therefore are interested in its automated synthesis.

Method: With the aim of flexibility, we reported the first fully automated synthesis of [11C]PIB with the coupling of two commercial synthesizers.

Fully automated [18F]fluorocholine synthesis in the TracerLab MX FDG Coincidence synthesizer.

Introduction: We developed a new fully automated method for the radiosynthesis of [18F]fluorocholine by modifying the commercial 2-[18F]fluoro-2-d-deoxy-glucose ([18F]FDG) synthesizer module (GE TracerLab MX, formerly Coincidence).

Methods: [18F]Flurocholine was synthesized by (18)F-fluoroalkylation of N,N-dimethylaminoethanol using [18F]fluorobromomethane as fluoromethylating agent. [18F]Fluorobromomethane was produced by reaction of dibromomethane with [18F]fluoride, assisted by Kryptofix 2.