Development of a Commercial Process for (S)-β-Phenylalanine

The development of a commercial manufacturing route for (S)-beta-phenylalanine 8, a key pharmaceutical building block, is described. The different approaches which were investigated, based on catalytic asymmetric hydrogenation of enamide intermediates and on biocatalysis using acylase and lipase hydrolyses, are compared. The lipase resolution route was chosen for scale-up, and the final two-step process, based on readily available raw materials, is shown to be robust at full manufacturing scale