Development and Scale-Up of Three Consecutive Continuous Reactions for Production of 6-Hydroxybuspirone

This paper describes the development of a continuous, high yielding, and scalable enolization, oxidation, and quench process for the hydroxylation of the azapirone psychtropic agent buspirone to afford 6-hydroxybuspirone (6-hydroxy-8-4-(4-pyrimidin-2-yl-piperazin-1-yl)-butyl-8-aza-spiro4.5decane-7,9-dione). Two feed streams were reacted continuously using an in-line static mixer followed by oxidation in a continuous flow trickle-bed reactor. The laboratory reactor operation was demonstrated at steady state for over 40 h. The process was scaled up using both volumetric (enolization) and numbering-up (oxidation) scale-up strategies. A pilot-plant reactor was developed and successfully implemented in a three-batch campaign (47 kg input per batch).