Agrochemicals industry

The recognition of differences in the pharmacological activity of enantiomeric molecules has created the need to administer them - and therefore to obtain them -as isolated enantiomers. However, nowadays this problem affects not only the pharmaceutical industry, but also the agrochemical industry and food additive producers, both of which are increasingly concerned by this subject. 

A large range of equipment and types of application procedures are used in the agrochemical industry, and field trial techniques, where possible, should mimic these practices as closely and as accurately as possible. 

Dr. Day was a founding member of the Pesticide Handlers Exposure Database (PHED) Task Force, and was instrumental in the development of the database, which is now widely used in the field of pesticide worker exposure. In 1994, he was a key player in the formation of the Agricultural Worker Re-entry Task Force (ARTF) and the Outdoor Residential Exposure Task Force (ORETF), and he served as chairman of the ARTF Technical Committee from its inception in 1994 until his retirement from DowElanco. Dr. Day also served as his company s representative on the Residue Technical Committee of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) from 1989 to 1996. He continues to serve as a consultant to the agrochemical industry. 

Consider the following product design and evaluation problem from the agrochemical industry. A pesticide product consisting of an active ingredient and an additive need to be evaluated in terms of its controlled release characteristics from a polymeric microcapsule to a release medium. Here, since the AI and the additives (solvent and surfactant) are known, the product-evaluation problem consists of designing the microcapsule and identification of... 

In the 1970s and 1980s, however, it was believed that the key to wider use of solid-phase supported reagents and catalysts is their adoption in industry for fine chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing on a large scale. In fact, this restricted view hampered their wide use [7]. The dramatic developments in the need for compound library preparation in pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries have finally removed functionalized supports from their academic corner and helped reinvent them for industrial purposes and applications. 

To date, only a few iridium catalysts have been applied to industrially relevant targets, especially on the larger scale. It is likely that several types of Ir catalyst are, in principle, feasible for technical applications in the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries. At present, the most important problems are the relatively low catalytic activities of many highly selective systems and the fact, that relatively few catalysts have been applied to multifunctional substrates. For this reason, the scope and limitations of most catalysts known today have not yet been explored. For those in academic research, the lesson might be to employ new catalysts not only with monofunctional model compounds but also to test functional group tolerance and-as has already been done in some cases-to apply the catalysts to the total synthesis of relevant target molecules. 

Carmichael, N.G., H. Enzmann, I. Pate, and F. Waechter, 1997. The significance of mouse hver tumor formation for carcinogenic risk assessment results and conclusions from a survey of ten years of testing by the agrochemical industry. Environ. Health Perspect. 105 1196-1203. 

Polymers derived from natural sources such as proteins, DNA, and polyhy-droxyalkanoates are optically pure, making the biocatalysts responsible for their synthesis highly appealing for the preparation of chiral synthetic polymers. In recent years, enzymes have been explored successfully as catalysts for the preparation of polymers from natural or synthetic monomers. Moreover, the extraordinary enantioselectivity of lipases is exploited on an industrial scale for kinetic resolutions of secondary alcohols and amines, affording chiral intermediates for the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industry. It is therefore not surprising that more recent research has focused on the use of lipases for synthesis of chiral polymers from racemic monomers. 

Taking into account its much smaller size, the agrochemical industry has been more innovative than its pharmaceutical counterpart. Ten to twelve NMEs have been launched by the agrochemical industry each year during the past 25 years. The future development of demand for agrochemicals will depend primarily on the fate of genetically modified crops. The question as to whether they will be generally accepted for human nutrition by the public... 

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