Synthetic chemistry has been a driving force behind advances spanning from medicine to energetic materials; however, the field has struggled with a slow pace of discovery and synthetic route planning coupled with limited reproducibility, and difficulty scaling promising new molecules. Through advances in laboratory automation, these issues can be addressed while increasing expert chemist productivity when developing new molecules. Automated reaction platforms require the integration of route planning with a library of process units, beyond simple mixing and stirring, which are capable of reproducible multi-step syntheses, inline reaction monitoring, and reconfigurability.<br/>Our research has focused on the development of a flow chemistry platform capable of low e-factor synthesis, reaction recipe execution, multi-step syntheses, and robotic reconfigurability. Our talk will discuss, the development of a general toolbox of flow chemistry modules capable of handling solids, aggressive reagents, inline separations and intense reaction conditions required for organic synthesis. The modules and reagent connections have been designed to be automatically configured into a continuous flow process. The system is controlled through a web-based interface which generates reaction recipes and is connected to a synthetic route planning software. These recipes can be queued, allowing the autonomous execution of multiple syntheses or optimization of a single reaction step. Informed by machine learning, our platform has been used to rapidly synthesize a variety of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) and dyes requiring stereoselectivity, site-selectivity, library generation, and convergent synthesis. With the development of standard process modules and rapid reconfigurability, the developed robotic platform aims to increase synthetic repeatability and lab-to-lab transferability, decrease the time necessary for molecule development, and allow chemists to focus on pathway refinement, reaction optimization, and process analytics.

Automated system for knowledge-based continuous organic synthesis: Reaction platform for chemical synthesis

256th National Meeting (2018)

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