During a collaboration between the LCT and the Chemical Engineering Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, LCT researcher Pieter Plehiers contributed to the software that allowed a robot to semi-autonomously carry out the full process of synthesizing a target chemical – including suggesting a limited number of synthetic routes with a high evaluated likelihood of success and automatically configuring a continuous flow setup, based on the selected synthesis and required unit operations. The platform – which forms a significant step in automating the process of drug development – is presented in Science (SCI-IF 2018: 41.04) as research article, titled “A robotic platform for flow synthesis of organic compounds informed by AI planning”
The authors are Connor W. Coley, Dale A. Thomas III, Justin A. M. Lummiss, Jonathan N. Jaworski, Christopher P. Breen, Victor Schultz, Travis Hart, Joshua S. Fishman, Luke Rogers, Hanyu Gao, Robert W. Hicklin, Pieter P. Plehiers, Joshua Byington, John S. Piotti, William H. Green, A. John Hart, Timothy F. Jamison, and Klavs F. Jensen
More information can be found via: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6453/eaax1566