Flexible Automation: A new approach to meet evolving chemistry challenges

Automated executions of chemical synthesis and discovery has risen as a critical enabling technology. New tools combining advanced robotics with experiment planning by machine learning, known as self-driving labs, are now attainable. However, the optimal deployment of these technologies remains under development, requiring a recursive design-make-build cycle dedicated to tuning and evolving the robotic platform.

This new approach has been termed ‘flexible automation’ and enables the cost and time-effective design, construction and reconfiguration of automated experiments. By leveraging many of the principles from Industry 4.0, including rapid fabrication, Internet-of-Things devices, cloud-based software, and open-source API we have created a set of simple reconfigurable tools to address a diverse set of applications spanning pharmaceutical process chemistry and even impacting mining and resource extraction. These rapid improvements are made possible through the fusion of best-in-class existing hardware (eg,  Unchained Labs Junior for liquid handling and HTE, Mettler-Toledo EasyMax for large scale automated lab reactor, Agilent UPLC for online analysis, Vaportec R-Series for continuous plug-flow reactions) with a variety of bespoke tools and code to integrate complicated workflows. This presentation will introduce this method and provide case studies.

Key Learning Objectives:

• Learn strategies to rapidly develop hybrid and fully automated experimental workflows
• Learn best practices to design and deploy autonomous reaction optimization for chemical synthesis
• See case studies for integrating automation into small molecule synthesis programs

Who Should Attend:

• Process development and medicinal chemists
• Automation scientists and engineers
• Scientists involved in high throughput experimentation
   

Presenter: Jason Hein (CEO and Co-Founder, Telescope Innovations)

Presenter: Melissa O'Meara (Forensic Science Consultant, C&EN Media Group)