ThalesNano is a world-leading provider of continuous process technologies and flow chemistry instruments in the rapidly developing market of laboratory and process scale flow reactors.

The company has the widest portfolio of bench-top continuous process instruments. Its H-Cube® continuous-flow hydrogenation reactor and the pilot plant scale version H-Cube Midi™ are used in hundreds of laboratories in four continents and have become the new industry standard for hydrogenation.
Flow chemistry, an emerging technology, allows the rapid optimization and synthesis of organic compounds, including reactions with unrealizable hazardous reaction conditions. Additional benefits are seen in the area of Green Chemistry and lab automation. This technology also promotes the rapid scale-up from mg to kg quantities which in the long run will result in lower CAPEX and OPEX.

The miniaturization of chemical reactors offers many fundamental and practical advantages to the pharmaceutical industry in the synthesis of compounds for high-throughput screening.

Reactions performed in microreactors invariably generate purer products in higher yields and in shorter periods of time than the equivalent batch reactions. Sufficient quantities of product are produced to perform full instrumental characterization. One of the obvious applications of these systems is combinatorial chemistry and drug discovery, where the generation of compounds with either different reagents or under variable conditions is an essential factor. In short, microreactor technology has the potential to revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry because the number of potential drug candidates that can be prepared and screened can be considerably increased. Therefore, the likelihood of developing new drugs is enhanced.

Microreactors are also more convenient and cost-effective than conventional systems. When running the same process in a microreactor array the scaling effort is prevented and fewer personnel are required to operate the continuous process. In a cost comparison calculation, it is assumed that yields are increased and the solvent consumption is reduced thanks to lower thermal buffering requirements.

Combinatorial chemistry and parallel synthesis of new drug candidates in microscale is an untapped area. ThalesNano has worked on this model and has developed a variety of chemical reactions with optimization at several levels. Combining these processes in series enables ThalesNano to perform combinatorial chemistry in a microfluidic environment on an industrial scale.