The opportunity to learn complex patterns of chemical reactivity from organic reaction data is increasingly clear. Data-driven machine learning models have been designed and applied to planning synthetic pathways, recommending reaction conditions for each putative transformation, and even predicting what the major products of a yet-untested reaction might be, e.g., for impurity prediction. These tasks in “predictive synthesis” promise to streamline pharmaceutical development at stages where synthetic route development occurs. Supporting these modeling efforts is chemical reaction data, capturing the details of how an experiment was performed and its outcome. There are few curated databases that record organic reactions and even fewer that are available to researchers, even commercially. The Open Reaction Database (https://open-reaction-database.org/ & DOI: 10.1021/jacs.1c09820) is an initiative to support machine learning and related efforts in reaction prediction, chemical synthesis planning, and experimental design. Our goals are to provide a structured format for chemical reaction data, make data freely available, encourage sharing of pre-competitive proprietary data, and provide an interface to browsing/downloading that data. We have defined a reaction schema using Protocol Buffers that provides thorough coverage of experimental details that we know are important for reproducibility. Importantly, we capture information in a structured format, rather than an unstructured text format as is currently used during publication (e.g., as supporting information). Analytical data, both raw and processed, can be associated with experimental outcomes. Reaction data can be recorded programmatically (e.g., using Python) or using an interactive web editor that is more approachable for those without coding experience. A mechanism for dataset enumeration allows one reaction entry to be rapidly expanded into hundreds or thousands, as is needed for defining the result of a high-throughput screen. In this talk, I will describe the technical aspects of the schema and database as well as our experience so far with use and adoption. Ongoing challenges and potential partnerships will be discussed.

The Open Reaction Database (ORD) initiative for standardizing and sharing organic reaction data

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ACS Fall 2022

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