''The Romance Of The Telescope''

‘’The Romance Of The Telescope’’

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When I started out in small molecule manufacture in the early 1990’s and first heard of telescoping as a process development tool, the first thing that came to mind was the band Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark [OMD for short], a group I’d listened to a lot through my teenage year in the 1980’s.

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One of my favourite songs by them was a piece called ‘’The Romance Of The Telescope’’. Written by band leaders Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys, the track first saw the light of day on the B-side of their ‘’Joan Of Arc’’ single in late 1981, where it was billed as ‘’Unfinished’’.

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I always listened to B-sides of singles I bought, fascinated by what lurked on the flip sides of the more-illustrious A-side songs. ‘’Unfinished’’ was an impressive piece of music, and the title suggested it was still a work-in-progress, so could get even better and re-emerge at some unspecified future date.

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Re-emerge it did, as a track on the band’s next album ‘’Dazzle Ships’’ in early 1983, where it was now called ‘’The Romance Of The Telescope’’ and was, as far as I could tell, indistinguishable from the ‘’Unfinished’’ version! The song remains a fan favourite, and sometimes gets an outing at concerts to this day, four decades on. I’ve heard it at OMD concerts in the encore, and for me, it’s the perfect ‘going-home’ song.

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But I digress. Back to telescoping in chemical molecule manufacture. It’s to do with the number of transformations [chemical reactions] needed to get from your starting molecule to your target molecule [the active ingredient for your medicine]. Consider the following:

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A->B->C->D->E->F->G

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A is your input material. Each of the six steps here represent a single transformation. That’s six times you have to charge input powders, solvents and other reagents and create the reaction conditions needed to convert your starting molecule to the target molecule. Six times you have to go on to crystallise, isolate and dry powder. That target molecule becomes the input for the next step. You continue on like this until you get to E [your pre-penultimate], F [your penultimate] and eventually G [your active ingredient].

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To perform all of these steps would take a lot of time, driving down profitability and lengthening the time it takes to get the medicine to patient. Added to the time manufacturing six steps takes is the six changeovers, where you have to perform intra-product cleaning of your process train after each step is completed.

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Telescoping is the cavalry that rides to the rescue, allowing some of the steps to be daisy-chained together so that multiple reactions can be performed in a sequence before you next have to isolate powder. R&D will determine how many steps can be telescoped, and dictate what is involved [solvent exchanges, for example]. In the example above you could reduce six processing steps down to three as follows:

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A->C->E->G

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In getting from A to C you are performing two transformations, one from A to B and then from B to C, in a telescoped process. You then have another telescoped process that gets you through the previous C to D and D to E steps, and then another that gets you through the previous E to F and F to G steps. E gets a promotion to penultimate from pre-penultimate and C is your new pre-penultimate.

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The telescoping above has cut down your manufacturing time and costs. It has cut down on the amount of intra-product cleaning you have to do [cleaning can be very expensive, especially where organic solvents have to be used] and it has got the medicine to the patient quicker.

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Will finish with a few lines from ‘’The Romance Of The Telescope’’ which I find inspiring:

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‘’We’re just waiting, looking skyward

As the days come down

Someone promised there’d be answers

If we stayed around’’