Dr. Stephan Bachmann, Dr. Raphael Bigler, Dr. Dainis Kaldre, Dr. Dominique Kummli, Dr. René Lebl, Dr. David Linder, Dr. Ugo Orcel, Dr. Isabelle Prévot, and Dr. Jörg Sedelmeier from F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., Basel, Switzerland, have been awarded the Sandmeyer Prize by the Swiss Chemical Society (SCS). The Sandmeyer Prize is presented annually to individuals or teams for outstanding work in industrial or applied chemistry conducted in Switzerland or by Swiss nationals abroad. The Sandmeyer Award Lectures will take place at the 17. Freiburger Symposium in Fribourg on April 4, 2025, and the SCS Fall Meeting in Zurich on September 4, 2025.

The Hoffmann-La Roche collegaues receive the award “in recognition of the team’s outstanding achievements to enable the commercial manufacturing process of Divarasib”. The award is endowed with CHF 20’000.

Divarasib, developed by Hoffmann-La Roche and its subsidiary Genentech, is a KRAS G12C inhibitor currently undergoing Phase III clinical trials. It targets cancers driven by the KRAS G12C mutation and has demonstrated promising clinical activity in treating patients with advanced KRAS G12C-positive solid tumors. The team’s efforts have led to a landmark achievement—the first example of a highly atroposelective Negishi coupling at manufacturing scale, enabling the isolation of the step product (R_a)-4 as a single isomer without chromatography (pictured below). The team has also improved other key synthesis steps, resulting in a sixfold increase in yield and a 29-fold reduction in process mass intensity.

Selected Publications

• Divarasib: A Promising New Drug for Cancer Treatment, EU Clinical Trials (accessed April 2, 2025)
• Roche presents positive phase Ib data at AACR 2023, reinforcing the potential of its KRAS G12C inhibitor divarasib in advanced solid tumours, Roche Press Release, April 18, 2023. (accessed April 2, 2025)
• J. Xu, L. Ngiap-Kie, J. Timmerman, J. Shen, K. Clagg, U. Orcel, R. Bigler, E. Trachsel, R. Meier, N. A.
  White, J. Burkhard, L. E. Sirois, Q. Tian, R. Angelaud, S. Bachmann, H. Zhang, F. Gosselin, Second-Generation Atroposelective Synthesis of KRAS G12C Covalent Inhibitor GDC-6036, Org. Lett.
  2023, 25(19), 3417–3422. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.orglett.3c00961
• S. M. Kelly, R. Lebl, T. C. Malig, T. Bass, D. Kummli, D, Kaldre, U. Orcel, L. Tröndlin, D. Linder, J.
  Sedelmeier, S. Bachmann, C. Han, H. Zhang, F. Gosselin, Synthesis of a Highly Functionalized Quinazoline Organozinc toward KRAS G12C Inhibitor Divarasib (GDC-6036), Enabled through Continuous Flow Chemistry, Org. Process Res. Dev. 2024, 28(5), 1546–1555. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.oprd.3c00164