Catalysts are the molecular machines that build the pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and materials modern society depends on, but each catalyst is typically designed to work on only a narrow set of chemical targets, leaving vast numbers of potentially useful molecules out of reach. This project tackles that bottleneck by developing a new design framework that produces not a single catalyst, but an entire family of them, each tuned to selectively transform a different chemical bond. The researchers will focus on C–H and O–H bonds, which are common in bioactive molecules and notoriously difficult to modify without creating unwanted by-products. Current catalyst design is slow and substrate-specific; this framework aims to make it fast and flexible, giving chemists a toolkit rather than a single tool. If successful, the approach could dramatically accelerate the discovery of new drugs, crop-protection chemicals, and advanced materials by making previously inaccessible molecules easy to synthesise. The framework is designed to be simple enough for other research groups to adopt quickly, potentially reshaping how the entire field approaches catalyst design. This is fundamental science with a clear practical trajectory—it does not deliver a product, but it could change how efficiently the chemical industry invents new ones.
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The discovery of functional chemicals has revolutionised and continues to benefit human society. They serve as the pharmaceuticals that underpin our health systems, the agrochemicals that sustain crop production and the materials integral to modern devices. Due to the continued emergence of new societal challenges, such as diseases, climate change and plastic pollution, chemical discovery remains an ongoing venture. Thus, a critical challenge in modern chemistry is providing strategies that facilitate simple access to new chemicals. Catalysis is the preeminent technology to achieve this and the impact of this technology is underlined by the regular conferment of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for advances in this field (asymmetric catalysis in 2001, alkene metathesis in 2005, cross-coupling reactions in 2010, organocatalysis in 2021 and click chemistry in 2022). A key driver in the success of catalysis is its ability to yield the selective formation of one particular chemical and avoid the formation of undesired by-products. To achieve this, catalysts must be judiciously designed to favour the formation of the desired product and are often applicable to a small range of substrates. As a consequence, there are still incalculable numbers of chemicals that are challenging to access. This project will establish a new framework for the design of catalysts that, instead of providing just one catalyst to facilitate selective access to a small range of chemical products, will provide a family of catalysts to facilitate selective access to a wide range of products. This catalyst design framework is ideal for addressing this challenge as it intrinsically provides rapid and flexible access to a markedly larger and more diverse library of catalysts in comparison to previous approaches. To demonstrate the utility of this framework, it will be applied to the discovery of novels catalysts that promote the transformation of C–H and O–H bonds, both of which are ubiquitous in bioactive chemicals. One of the key impacts of this project is that it will enable the chemical community to more readily access previously undiscovered chemicals. This will have considerable societal impact by facilitating the discovery and development of new pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals and other chemical products. Within academia, this work will serve as inspiration to other research groups and the simplicity of the framework will encourage its facile adoption to tackle other challenges in catalysis.
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