Searching for blockbuster drugs and wonder materials is an arduous task for chemists. To make their promising compounds, they must trawl through millions of known chemical reactions, with hundreds of thousands more added annually, and then test whether it is possible to synthesize them.
Now, researchers have created an artificial-intelligence system that vastly simplifies and accelerates the process of chemical synthesis. The system, which is called MOSAIC and is described in a study published in Nature on 19 January1, recommended conditions that researchers were able to use to generate 35 compounds with the potential to become products like pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals or cosmetics without needing to do any further trawling or tweaking.
“The synthesis of small molecules is the slow step in drug discovery and a number of other important areas,” says study co-author Timothy Newhouse, a chemist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
MOSAIC could remove this bottleneck, adds Newhouse, so could lead to more and better products. It is “capable of drafting complete laboratory instructions — detailed enough for chemists to follow — to help create molecules that have not previously existed”.
To read more, click here.