CHAIR

C-H activation is a modern research field that has been witnessing extremely rapid development and has established itself as one of the most important fields in organic chemistry, allowing construction of complex molecular scaffolds from simple precursors. Indeed, the C-H activation strategy paves the way towards straightforward, step-economic and environmentally benign preparation of molecules of interest. However, although these key advantages, practical applications of the C-H activation way of thinking in industry are still scarce. Several reasons account for this lack of applications and amongst them two are particularly important: 1) limited interactions between academia and industry that clearly restricts a technology transfer between these two sectors and 2) limited number of young scientists with strong expertise in the C-H activation field. In order to overcome this gap and provide few tangible solutions, it’s crucial to promote, on one hand, the scientific collaborations between academic key players in metal-catalyzed C-H activation and scientists from industry. On the other hand, a new generation of young chemists, future leaders in the private sector, should be trained in the C-H activation field. Inspired by this issue, we have recently settled a new consortium between nine European academic groups and six industrial partners, all interested in the C-H activation field. The ambition of this consortium, that brings together scientists with complementary skills and expertise, is to promote applications of the C-H activation field in industry, by rendering this methodology more suited and in accordance with industrial expectations and requirements. This general objective has been divided into four axes: 1) use of the C-H activation in pharmaceutical industry via late-stage functionalisation of advanced drug precursors furnishing a molecular diversity from a common, advanced precursor; 2) synthesis of new building block via direct functionalisation of feedstock and raw materials; 3) construction of original organic materials with appealing features via direct functionalisation of simple precursors; 4) design of new technological solutions to allow implementation of the C-H activation for a large-scale industrial production. The project designed in that way gives a great promise to efficiently implement the C-H activation way of thinking in industry in both, the research sector where complex compounds are requested for new and appealing applications, and the production sector, where the C-H activation is prompt to pave the way towards more sustainable synthesis and production processes. This consortium perfectly suits call for proposal MSCA-ITN-2019. Accordingly, our objective is to prepare the proposal and submit it in January 2019. The purpose of the request MRSEI is to obtain a financial support that could help us in a preparation of such a big project. MRSEI would allow us to organize few scientific meetings between all partners and to request help of a consultant specialized in the ITN call for proposals. It should be noted that CHAIR was already submitted for MSCA-ITN-2018 call for proposal and we obtained a good score of 90,60. This results strongly encourages us to resubmit an improved version of the proposal for the call 2019.