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From: Larry
Scientists make digital breakthrough in chemistry that could revolutionize the drug industry
- At the Cronin Lab at the University of Glasgow chemists developed software that translates a chemist's words into recipes for molecules that a robot can understand.
- Professor Lee Cronin, the lab's principal investigator, has designed a robotic chemist called a "chemputer" that can produce chemicals from XDL programs, including the drug remdesivir, a FDA-approved antiviral treatment for the coronavirus.
- Cronin and his colleagues represent one of many groups rushing to bring chemistry into the digital age.
digital instructions for whipping up a batch of the nearly 400-atom molecule at the push of a button have been sitting on Github, an online software repository, freely available to anyone with the hardware needed to execute the chemical "program."
A dozen such chemical computers or "chemputers" sit in the University of Glasgow lab of Lee Cronin, the chemist who designed the bird's nest of tubing, pumps, and flasks, and wrote the remdesivir code that runs on it. He's spent years dreaming of a future where researchers can distribute and produce molecules as easily as they email and print PDFs
Cronin and his colleagues described their machine's capability to produce multiple molecules last year, and now they've taken a second major step toward digitizing chemistry with an accessible way to program with the machine. Their software turns academic papers into chemputer-executable programs that researchers can edit without learning to code, they announced earlier this month in Science. And they're not alone. The team represents one of dozens of groups spread across academia and industry all racing to bring chemistry into the digital age, a development that could lead to safer drugs, more efficient solar panels, and a disruptive new industry.
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