Automation transforms economies and workforces and is used in many leading organizations worldwide to become more efficient and competitive. Automation will accelerate the shift in required workforce skills we have seen over the past 15 years. Miniaturization of processes enables the production of prototypes or intermediates by the acceleration of property optimization while reducing expenses. Automation is already established in many research areas such as engineering, molecular biology, or medicine. However, synthetic chemistry is still operating like 100 years ago, mostly sequential and slow and on an unnecessary large scale. Areas involving a lot of synthetic chemistry like drug discovery and development or materials science could benefit dramatically from automation and robotics. Recently, the quest for automation and miniaturization in organic synthesis is becoming strong. For example, the pharma company Merck recently published some of its efforts on experimentation in high throughput synthetic chemistry.[1] The Dömling group has pioneered the use of acoustic droplet ejection (ADE) and i-DOT technology to perform automated nano-scale syntheses.[2-6] The Dömling group is building a first-of-its-kind prototype of an autonomous highly miniaturized nano synthesis and optimization platform which will be fully driven by artificial intelligence.

Automation + Miniaturization = Acceleration

ACS Fall 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.