<p>Many chiral compounds have become of great interest to the pharmaceutical industry as they possess various biological activities. Concurrently, the concept of “memory of chirality” has been proven as a powerful tool in asymmetric synthesis, while flow chemistry has begun its rise as a new enabling technology to add to the ever increasing arsenal of techniques available to the modern day chemist. Here, we have employed a new simple electrochemical microreactor design to oxidise an L-proline derivative at room temperature in continuous flow. Flow performed in microreactors offers up a number of benefits allowing reactions to be performed in a more convenient and safer manner, and even allow electrochemical reactions to take place without a supporting electrolyte due to a very short interelectrode distance. By the comparison of electrochemical oxidations in batch and flow we have found that continuous flow is able to outperform its batch counterpart, producing a good yield (71%) and a better enantiomeric excess (64%) than batch with a 98% conversion. We have, therefore, provided evidence that continuous flow chemistry has the potential to act as a new enabling technology to replace some aspects of conventional batch processes. </p>
C. Oliver Kappe is Awarded the 2018 IUPAC-ThalesNano Prize for Flow Chemistry