Researchers in Massachusetts Institute of technology have developed an automated machine that can perform several chemical reactions in a short time to determine the most efficient route for synthesizing complex organic molecules such as various drugs and artificially synthesized natural products such as proteins and vitamins.
Researchers in the field of organic synthesis, spend weeks or months trying to come up with a synthetic route for a new complex organic molecule such as a new drug. These routes often are not efficient, so they spend even more time, trying to optimize the route so that the target molecule can be synthesized with high yields in large scales in industry. This new system can test and optimize a new synthetic route in about a day.
Synthesis of useful but complex organic molecules is a time-consuming process. Image from Pixabay
According to Timothy F. Jamison, head of MIT’s Department of Chemistry, in an interview with MIT News“our goal was to create an easy to use system that would allow scientist to come up with the best conditions for making their molecules of interest”. This would allow chemists to have more time to come up with new ideas that can be easily and efficiently tested.
This machine uses a continuous flow systemco-designed by Jamison a few years ago. In this system, chemical reagents flow through a series of tubes and at different points, new chemicals are added to the reaction. So, the machine performs a multi-step synthetic process continuously without the need to manually transfer the products of a reaction to be used as the starting materials of the next reaction.
So, the chemist comes up with a new synthetic route for a desired molecule and programs the machine with the reaction conditions. Then the machine uses an optimization program to explore different conditions and determines the reaction conditions that result in the highest yield.
This new system can test and improve a synthetic route for a complex organic molecule like a pharmaceutical in a day. Image from shutterstock
In my opinion, innovations like this can easily and rapidly improve synthetic organic chemistry so many useful natural organic molecules can be efficiently synthetized in industry. This means more reasonable prices for many drugs and important supplements.
The researchers have patented this new technology and published the results of the research as a journal article in Science.
