An automated synthetic chemistry platform.
The challenge
Despite incredible strides in the discovery and commercialization of synthetic chemicals as drugs, agrochemicals and specialty materials, the process of performing synthetic chemistry has changed little in more than a century. Chemists today still spend a large proportion of their time manually recreating and scaling literature-reported synthesis procedures at the expense of innovation and productivity. Because of the manual nature of current synthetic chemistry, chemists also face major challenges in reproducibility where reported “known” chemistry generally needs to be re-optimized for use by other practitioners.
The solution
SRI’s biosciences division has developed SynFini™, a suite of tools that leverages AI to automate the translation of ideas into testable physical molecules. The SynFini platform helps scientists maximize time spent on what to make, rather than how to make by accelerating chemistry design, development and synthesis. Our goal is to deliver better science with quicker decision timelines and allow chemists to focus on innovation.
How it works
SynFini enables full digital capture of synthesis protocols so they are fully reportable and reproducible. Solutions in the SynFini suite focus on key areas of route design, reaction screening and optimization (RSO), and multi-step synthesis development. The systems can work independently but provide greater value when combined for applications across synthetic chemistry such as new and existing materials discovery and development, including drug discovery and continuous manufacturing process design. Our platform is designed to work in complement with current and future AI molecular design systems.
- SynRoute™ is a computational synthetic planning tool that provides synthetic strategies toward compounds of interest. Utilizing AI/big data and machine learning, the software platform analyzes and optimizes a route design in minutes and prioritizes the best synthetic strategies based on cost, likelihood of success and ease of implementation.
- SynJet™ is a high-throughput automated chemistry system for rapidly screening and optimizing reaction conditions. Utilizing an ink jet printing platform and standard laboratory analytics, SynJet can perform RSO in a matter of hours for challenging 2-4 step chemistries that may take weeks to optimize by traditional manual methods. Key parameters such as time, temperature, stoichiometry, and pH, reagents, solvents, and substrates can be rapidly explored using Design of Experiment (DoE) in a fully automated process. Although a stand-alone module, SynJet is designed to provide starting points for multi-step route optimization for both batch and flow synthesis.
- AutoSyn™ is a new flow chemistry hardware platform that reliably and reproducibly performs multi-step synthesis. The system is configured like a miniaturized, bench scale “chemical plant” with integrated analytics. Modular components allow for variations in temperature and pressure and enable integration of custom and off-the-shelf reactor technologies. AutoSyn provides access to more than 3,000 different multistep reaction configurations and can synthesize on the milligram to gram scale with the flexibility to switch between synthesis of molecules in less than two hours.
Partner with us
Partner opportunities are available with the SynFini platform and components. Contact biosciences@sri.com to learn more about potential for chemical design and optimization solutions such as:
- Creating scalable operations for rapid synthesis and testing of individual molecules or molecular classes for structure activity relationship (SAR) development for pharmaceutics, agrochemicals and specialty chemicals.
- Integration of third-party AI based drug discovery platforms and SynFini automation for rapid design and synthesis of optimized compounds.
- Early API continuous manufacturing process development with improved repeatability and scalability from micro scale to macro scale reducing the time and cost to generate products.
- Utilize AI software systems in conjunction with our hardware platform to shorten timelines during discovery and optimization as well as validate AI data with a rapid synthesis hardware system.
- Production of drugs and medical countermeasures on demand
SynFini™ presented by Nathan Collins at BIO 2020
In this presentation from the BIO Digital International Convention 2020, SRI Biosciences’ Chief Strategy Officer, Nathan Collins, provides a brief overview of the SynFini™ fully automated synthetic chemistry platform.
