Yiming Mo

With the current need to expedite new drug development, reduce cost and increase the availability of existing drugs, and improve the carbon footprint of pharmaceutical manufacturing, it is of great importance to discover powerful and green synthetic methods to construct new molecules. Yiming Mo’s has been focusing on developing innovative engineering solutions to enable continuous manufacturing of the pharmaceuticals. Notably, his efforts in combing microfluidics and electrosynthesis to construct drug-relevant molecules under oxidant/reductant-free and mild conditions gave revolutionary opportunities to make the drug manufacturing green and safe. There are two major achievements that he has made in this field:   

(1) Microfluidic electrochemistry technology. He proposed a brand-new strategy by minimizing the electrode distance using microfluidic technology, allowing rapid interelectrode mixing of reactive radical species. This simple and elegant approach changed how electrochemical reactions can be designed and controlled, which greatly improved the practicality of electrochemistry in synthesizing drug-relevant molecules.  

(2) Automated high-throughput screening platform. The speed of experimental condition screening is always the bottleneck for discovering new chemistries. To tackle this challenge, he constructed a fully automated high-throughput screening platform utilizing microfluidic chip and automation technology. This platform was demonstrated for rapid condition screening of unexplored electrochemical reactions, giving very rich reaction information in a short time with minimal material consumption. This autonomous high-throughput screening technology can greatly expedite development of new reactions.