Comments on: Ruthenium Removal After Metathesis Reactions

By: ANON

ANON — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:16:57 +0000

There are no problems in patenting processes, it has been done many many times! Also, any good patent attorney would make sure that hydrogen peroxide would be covered in the broader sense i.e. perborates, percarbonates etc. Also, I am sure that you realise all chemical processes have to be disclosed in the synthesis of pharma compounds and the like, enforced by the European “REACH” legislation, I’m sure the US has similar measures.

By: milkshake

milkshake — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 13:07:45 +0000

my understanding is that patents get quite expensive later one once you move into the national patent stage. Perhaps their technology transfer office figured there wasn’t much money to be made in such use / process methodology patent. It is much easier to enforce patent on a particular compound (drug, catalyst, etc) as a “composition of matter” than on general way of using something in the process. Even if some company scaled up a key metathesis step and used peroxide quench in it to get the Ru out – how do you find out what they are putting into their reactor? And it is not a critically-important step, they could have used something else, like perborate or percarbonate or Oxone or bleach wash if necessary, or scavenge Ru with metal-binding resins.

By: ANON

ANON — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:56:06 +0000

Looks like they did patent it, although they foolishly dropped it, see WO2007091085 at espacenet…….

By: David Grant

David Grant — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:46:05 +0000

Looks like it’s a process that would be relatively easy to scale-up, e.g. for use in industry. Did the university in question get a patent on this (and if not, why not)?