Organofluorine chemistry is critical to our modern lives with many of the everyday drugs and materials we take for granted containing carbon-fluorine bonds. Therefore, investment into the development of new fluorination technologies is vital to secure ready access to societally and economically critical compounds whilst offering avenues to protect UK jobs that could be jeopardised by upcoming environmental restrictions. The Selective Elemental Fluorination Future Leaders Fellowship (SELF-FLF) is an academic/industrial collaborative programme to leverage the most atom-efficient, cheapest, and industrially applicable source of electrophilic fluorine atoms, elemental fluorine (F2), to develop a suite of new selective fluorination processes. It will tackle the pressing need for new fluorination approaches whilst minimising the generation of toxic and biopersistent perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). It will facilitate a dramatic step change in how fluorination is conducted at scale and will allow UK industry to create new and improved products to positively impact the UK’s economy and society.
Fluorination is vital to many industries, for example, >20% of small-molecule drugs and >25% of agrochemicals incorporate fluorine atoms whilst the pharmaceuticals (£40.7B), plastic and rubber products (£27.7B) and electronics (£25.3B) sectors all rely heavily on fluorinated compounds. However, there are two main hurdles currently facing industrial fluorination. Firstly, selective fluorination of molecules relies on expensive and highly atom-inefficient reagents. This means industrial-scale selective fluorination can be extremely challenging and prohibitively expensive. Secondly, there are environmental implications for PFAS generation, which are a class of molecules that are highly biopersistent and harmful to the environment. Due to this, PFAS are about to see a high degree of restriction in their manufacture and application through governmental legislation (e.g. EU REACH programme). PFAS therefore need to be replaced, minimised as byproducts in fluorination reactions, and the manufacturing sites for them repurposed for other less polluting selective fluorination processes.
The objectives of SELF-FLF are to:
Develop new fluorination processes using F2 in combination with substrate activation methods, which are atom-efficient, economical, scalable and industrially relevant to safely and cleanly generate vital fluorinated products.
Work closely with the SELF-FLF industrial partner F2 Chemicals (the largest manufacturer and user of F2 in the UK) to commercialise the developed fluorination processes. This will mitigate against upcoming environmental restrictions, thus increasing job protection in UK chemical industry and economic prosperity.
Develop the SELF-FLF team and corresponding F2 facilities to provide unique opportunities for innovation within the UK industrial landscape. This will establish Durham as a centre for fluorination technologies and one of the few academic sites globally capable of developing elemental fluorination reactions.
Secure the training pipeline of fluorine chemists for the UK chemical industry as well as develop a unique skillset within the PI. This will facilitate the PI in becoming a world leader in elemental fluorination.
The SELF-FLF team will bring together a range of expertise as well as unique equipment only available at Durham University to deliver an innovative, ground-breaking programme that will deliver substantial benefits to the PI, Durham University, UK PLC, and the UK taxpayer offering clear pathways to commercialisation and wider impact for both chemical industry and society.