Today we continue with the "Scientists Who Are Changing Lab Models" series, introducing the Tweeters from the UK mentioned at the end of the last month. Lush hair. Professional cat breeding. Lee Cronin, who does a side job in research, sees how he plays with computers and chemistry at the same time.
Lee Cronin is not the same as the "old-fashioned and rigorous" professors in the traditional impression in terms of clothing, writing, and speech, but gives a first impression of being fashionable, funny, brain-opening, and even a little crazy, and of course, one of his distinctive research directions, Chemputer (which may be translated as a chemical computer). In the interview, Cronin mentioned that when he was 8 years old, he rummaged through his parents' house, looking for the components that made the computer. To distract him, and to save the few surviving appliances, his father bought him a set of chemical kits. Cronin immediately set about combining it with the electronic parts he had cleaned. He had no idea of Chemputer in his mind—at least not entirely—but he had begun the process of combining science and technology that would determine his life's work as a freewheeling experimentalist-inventor-entrepreneur.
Later in 2019 Lee Cronin formally proposed the concept and architecture of Chemputer. They abstracted the organic synthesis reaction system as a whole into four key stages: reaction, post-processing, separation, and purification, which are linked to the physical operation of the automated robotic platform, respectively, and dynamic analysis and adjustment of the reaction through analytical instruments such as NMR.
Control of the hardware allows individual unit operations to be arbitrarily combined into multi-step organic synthesis, and the brain that plays a role in the control is the software chempiler that cronin's team has been developing, which automatically compiles the input experimental records into standardized codes representing each step of the chemical experiment, as well as all the equipment and materials required to control the automated robotic system.
In the advanced version, chempiler can extract the record content of chemical reactions from a vast number of research papers through natural speech processing (NLP), and mark out the ambiguous content of the paper records. After all the ambiguity is resolved, the chempiler code can run the reaction by driving the reactor to "Paper in, product out", just like the chemical version of the e-book reader. In related work, Cronin's team demonstrated that chempiler-driven Chemputer completed the automatic synthesis of 12 compounds documented in the literature, including the analgesic lidocaine.
Cronin believes that any lab can assemble a Chemputer device for less than $10,000 using the packages he posted for free on the internet for machine building and programming. Although the version using glassware looks "primitive", Cronin is pragmatic and will always stick to a low-cost configuration for the spread of Chemputer. At the same time, he wants chempiler to be "a universal chemistry programming language" standardized enough for everyone who uses chempiler to document experiments to collaborate with each other, and his team is compiling a code list of the first 100 classical synthetic reactions so that every synthetic chemist deserves a chemistry computer.
On the industry side, Chemputer's ability to manufacture drugs on demand has attracted a lot of interest from several pharmaceutical companies. While drugs from aspirin to Viagra are mass-produced in factories, the industry sees an opportunity for Chemputer to customize small,300 personalized medicines that can treat diseases ranging from cancer to cystic fibrosis. So Cronin founded a company called Chemify to sell chemputer and the corresponding chempiler package. The team installed a prototype at pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in May 2019, and Dr Kim Branson, senior vice president and global head of artificial intelligence and machine learning at GlaxoSmithKline, said the Cronin team's research would make it easier for GlaxoSmithKline to "spread expertise." Once chemists have designed a molecule with excellent function, they no longer have to write tedious reports, and can directly "share" the recipe and even start synthesizing with a single click.
In Cronin's view, Chemputer will make even bigger waves in the research lab. "Most chemists spend 90 percent of their time studying known chemistry," he said. "In order to synthesize the molecules they want to make, they go through many preliminary steps, such as the chef preparing the ingredients for the soufflé (except that each step can take weeks and is highly toxic). If Chemputer can act as a sous chef — preparing any known molecule on demand — chemists can focus on innovation. ”
Lee Cronin's Lab Home: http://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/
Lee Cronin's Tweet: https://twitter.com/leecronin
In the next issue, we will talk about the creator of the "007 research machine" that made experimental chemists call out to the volume, Andy Cooper of the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom.