Trial synthesis
The first material and an honest answer about what will scale
Trial synthesis is the first stage of custom organic synthesis: assessing feasibility, making initial material and analysing the batch.
Stage 1 of 3. You have a structure, or a question about one. The first stage answers three things: whether it can be made, what it takes, and what the first batch tells you about everything after it.
Share your target or synthesis question. A chemist will assess feasibility and the first step.
Can you make it?
A chemist reviews your target, quantity and specifications. We provide a 24-hour technical response and propose the next step. Where experimental feasibility work is needed, we define its scope before proceeding.
Two ways people arrive here
A compound you cannot buy. It may be described in the literature but unavailable from commercial suppliers, or it may require a new synthesis route. We assess feasibility, the required quantity and analytics before defining the scope and quotation.
A task with a programme behind it. The route is published and is not reproducible; it works at milligrams and the biology is waiting; purity or analytics don’t meet specification. A successful trial synthesis can lead to route development, scale-up or recurring supply. The same team that makes the first batch continues to scale-up and supply, and the first batch is read with that in mind: what limited the yield, which step will not survive ten times the scale, what would change.
What you leave with
- The compound, at the agreed quantity, with the analytical data for that batch.
- A written assessment: the route as run, its limitations and the work needed before scale-up.
- A recommendation for the next stage. After successful synthesis, we assess the scale-up requirements and prepare a quotation once the scope is defined.
The trial establishes whether the compound can be made and what further work is needed before scale-up.
How this stage is priced
Fixed scope, short. Where the chemistry is sufficiently defined, a fixed outcome is quoted rather than hours. Where important questions remain, a feasibility phase comes first: a bounded piece of work that answers the open question, with a proper quotation on the other side of it. Which of the two your project is, you hear before you commit.
Selected trial synthesis projects
A stereoselective route that did not exist yet. A library of chiral compounds for an antiviral programme, five to ten steps each. The biology could not start without the material. Route developed from scratch, library delivered in twelve months.
Impurity identification and isolation for analytical method validation. Each impurity found during development had to be made as a reference standard, three to six steps, five to ten grams, full analytical package.
Compounds nobody had made, because nobody had designed them. Lipids for gene delivery, designed by the partner's team. No literature, because the compounds had not existed. Synthesis and purification developed for each new design in the series, one to five grams, since 2020.
What we are not claiming
- That every trial becomes a programme. Many do not need to, and a compound ordered once a year is a good project.
- A delivery date before the route is known. Response time is guaranteed; delivery time is quoted when the chemistry allows it.
- That routine catalogue compounds belong here. They are faster and cheaper elsewhere, and the assessment will say so.
If it works
After successful synthesis, the next step may be scale-up or recurring supply, depending on the required quantity and the readiness of the process.
Tell us what you need to make or achieve.
Share a target structure or describe your goal. A chemist will help define the next step.