A new catalyser makes it possible to obtain sustainable compounds key for the pharmaceutic industry

## A new catalyser makes it possible to obtain sustainable compounds key for the pharmaceutic industry

José Ramón Cabrero and Rosa Adam

The Department of Organic Chemistry of the UV, inside their unit in the Faculty of Pharmacy, has collaborated with the Institute of Technology (ITQ, UPV-CSIC) in the development of a heterogenic catalyser that makes possible to obtain lactamases – organic compounds of great interest for the pharmaceutic industries and of polymers– in a sustainable way. The work is published in Nature Communications.

The lactamases are very relevant functional groups present in the structure of organic molecules. In fact, lactamases are amines, substances that constitute an essential part of the proteins, and without them life wouldn’t be possible. Furthermore, lactamases are really important for the pharmaceutical industry: penicillin is a lactamase and among the ten most sold drugs in 2022, three of them were lactamases.

 “In this work we’ve been able to develop the first catalytic system of wide applicability to obtain lactamases in a practical, sustainable and selective way, a part of really accessible organic compounds and hydrogen, were the starting substrate, in this case a cyclic imide, suffers a process of hydrogenation generating water as unique derivative of the reaction”, explains **Jose Ramón Cabrero Antonino**, scientific of CSIC in the ITQ and author of correspondence of the work.

The research group has studied on detail not only the structure of the developed heterogeneous catalyser, but also an activation process and the mechanism for which the catalytic transformation takes place. This type of rational approximation to the heterogeneous catalysis applied to organic chemistry supposes a remarkable advance in this field.

“The deep comprehension of the structure of the catalyser and their activation process opens the potential application, of this and other related materials, in highly sustainable organic processes of interest”, affirms **Rosa Adam Ortiz**, researcher Ramón y Cajal from the Department of Organic Chemistry of the Universitat de València, in their unity from the Faculty of Pharmacy, and also correspondence author of the work.

On the other hand, this research results to be innovative from the point of view of the design of a new type of multifunctional bimetallic material as catalyser. In recent years, the design of bimetallic materials for catalytic processes that use hydrogen has been a really active field. The bimetallic combination described in this work hasn’t been explored until now in the heterogeneous catalysis field and, therefore, opens new roads in the field.

The Instituto de Microscopía Electrónica y Materiales de la Universidad de Cádiz (IMEYMAT) and Sincrotrón ALBA do also collaborate in the work.

The research has been financed by the Government of the Valencian Community, the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, la Caixa Foundation and the Programa de Excelencia Severo Ochoa of ITQ.

**Reference:**

**Building lactams by highly selective hydrodeoxygenation of cyclic imides using an alumina-supported AgRe bimetallic nanocatalyst.**Carles Lluna-Galán, Juan Camilo Arango-Daza, Daviel Gómez, Patricia Concepción, Rong Sun, Jose J. Calvino, Laura Simonelli, Rosa Adam & Jose R. Cabrero-Antonino. *Nature Communications* **volume 16**, Article number: 4119 (2025)

<https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-59514-7>

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Química
, Ciencias Médicas
, Ciencias Tecnológicas

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