Erickson, Gary W., Eric Lodewijk, Yeun-Kwei Han, George Schloemer, Sam Nguyen. SECOND GENERATION PROCESS DEVELOPMENT: "A NOVEL AND EFFICIENT PROCESS FOR CYTOVENE®"
Roche Colorado Corporation, Boulder Technology Center, 2075 North 55th Street, Boulder, CO 80301 (gary_w_erickson@roche.com)
Recently, scientists at the Roche Colorado Corporation, Boulder Technology Center developed a novel commercial process for the manufacture of Cytovene, a potent antiviral agent. This new process, the Guanine Tri Ester process, is now the current FDA registered manufacturing process for the world's supply of Cytovene. The process achieved the following environmental and economic goals through technology based designs for pollution prevention: reduction in the number of chemical processing steps from 6 to 2, reduction in the number of reagents and intermediates from 22 to 11, recovery and reuse of three out of four key reagents, reduction in the number of quantities of by-products and waste generated, doubling the processing throughput and increasing the overall yield of the final product by more than 25%.