Continuous flow synthesis of antimalarials: opportunities for distributed autonomous chemical manufacturing

The concept of distributed manufacturing of chemicals is presented and discussed, with specific focus on the context of preparing molecules that can combat the development of geographically-localised resistant strains of infectious pathogens. Specifically we present the case of antimalarial compounds and demonstrate that the flow chemistry community have already designed both a machine capable of distrubuted chemical manufacturing and a module that would be capable of producing artemisin derivatives at the point of use.