Process Scale-Up Symposium at the University of Oxford

Hard to believe it’s already been a month since I had the pleasure of attending the Process Scale-Up Symposium at the University of Oxford!

Part of my motivation for attending was this very common question I get whenever I mention process optimization: “If medicinal chemists already figured out how to make the molecule, why is process optimization still needed?”.

The short answer is that scale changes (almost) everything.Making milligrams in discovery is very different from making kilograms in process development. Heat transfer, mass transfer, mixing, and reaction kinetics all start to dominate. Conditions that worked perfectly in a small vial may behave very differently in a larger reactor.

Unlike population statistics - where a larger sample behaves more predictably - scaling a chemical process often means entering a different physical regime. That’s why scale-up is so challenging, and why kinetic understanding becomes so valuable.

It was great discussing these challenges with researchers and engineers across statistics, chemistry, and bioengineering during the workshop.

At ReactWise, we’re working on bringing more data-driven modelling and optimization into process optimization to help teams explore conditions more efficiently before committing to expensive scale-up experiments.

Discovery often celebrates going 0 → 1 - making a new molecule for the first time.

But to make enough to help people around the world, you need 1 → 100.