Austrian researchers develop efficient nickel catalyst activated by visible light

Behind glass walls at Austria's Institute of Science and Technology, blue LED lamps direct light onto small glass vessels. The light is not decoration—it is fuel. It activates a nickel catalyst that drives chemical reactions, and a team led by Bartholomäus Pieber has just shown the world that this approach works far better than anyone expected.

The work, published in Nature Catalysis, addresses a problem that has haunted pharmaceutical manufacturing for decades. Making drugs requires joining molecular building blocks together in precise ways, and for years the gold standard has been palladium-based catalysts. Palladium works beautifully. It is efficient, versatile, and has earned its reputation—the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized its power in cross-coupling reactions, the workhorse technique for assembling complex molecules. But palladium is scarce and expensive, a significant constraint when you are manufacturing at scale.

About a decade ago, researchers began experimenting with nickel as a substitute. Nickel is abundant and cheap. When paired with a light-activated system that converts visible light into chemical energy, it could theoretically replace palladium. The catch was real: nickel catalysts were sluggish and unreliable. They could not handle the same range of molecular building blocks, and they often degraded under challenging conditions. The promise was there, but the execution was not.

Pieber's group spent years understanding why nickel catalysts failed. In 2020, they made a key discovery: the degradation could be prevented by controlling reaction conditions carefully. It was progress, but the reactions moved slowly and required large amounts of nickel to work at all. "That was still far from an efficient method," Pieber acknowledged. "But it was an important proof-of-concept."

Then Aleksander Bena, a PhD student in the lab, took on the puzzle. He designed new ligand structures—organic molecules that attach to the nickel atom and shape how it behaves—and tested them methodically. Each failure taught him something. His persistence led to a ligand that fundamentally changed the game. The new catalyst could be activated directly by visible light and required far less nickel to do the work.

To prove the concept was not a fluke, Pieber assembled a small team—Trisha Banik, Christos Giannoudis, Florian Ortis, Haralds Baunis, and Gayathri Palissery—to test the catalyst's range. They synthesized more than 150 different products. Some were simple building blocks. Others were complex molecules and derivatives of fluoxetine, one of the world's most widely prescribed antidepressants. The catalyst handled them all.

The numbers are striking. The team reduced the amount of nickel needed to just 0.01 percent of the reaction mixture—100 parts per million. At that loading, a single nickel catalyst molecule produces up to 10,000 molecules of product. That efficiency, that turnover rate, had previously been achieved only with palladium. "Being able to do this with a nickel catalyst is really exciting," Pieber said. The combination of minimal metal use and broad applicability across many different molecular building blocks could reshape how pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals are made.

The breakthrough rests on understanding the fundamental chemistry of nickel at the molecular level. By designing a ligand that boosts catalytic activity when light activates it, the team turned an abundant metal into something that rivals the performance of a rare one. For an industry that measures costs in millions of dollars and environmental impact in tons of waste, that shift matters. The work points toward a future where expensive metals are no longer necessary, where light and clever chemistry do the heavy lifting instead.