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Homogenous catalysis

Hydrogenative double-bond deuteration

Nature Chemistry volume 15, pages 1332–1333 (2023)Cite this article

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Deuterated compounds are used in many applications such as mass-spectrometry standards, drugs or in organic light-emitting diodes. Now, hydrogen-activated homogeneous pincer complex catalysts can be used to perform selective alkene deuteration with the cheapest available deuterium source, D2O.

Highly deuterated compounds are well-known tools in many scientific and industrial applications, such as mass-spectrometry standards in bioanalytics, drugs with superior pharmacokinetic effects, or to increase the longevity of materials in dyes or organic light-emitting diodes1. For their synthesis, there is an increasing demand for processes with high deuteration selectivity and efficiency. Now, as they report in Nature Chemistry, David Milstein and co-workers have developed a hydrogenative alkene perdeuteration method using an acridanide-based ruthenium pincer complex and heavy water (D2O) as the deuterium source2.

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Fig. 1: An overview of the hydrogenative perdeuteration of double bonds.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sanofi Germany, Integrated Drug Discovery, Industriepark Höchst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Anika Tarasewicz & Volker Derdau

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  1. Anika Tarasewicz
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  2. Volker Derdau
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Correspondence to Volker Derdau.

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The authors are employed at Sanofi and hold stocks and shares of the company.

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Tarasewicz, A., Derdau, V. Hydrogenative double-bond deuteration. Nat. Chem. 15, 1332–1333 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-023-01326-7

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