Chemist Robot Will Revolutionize Chemical Discovery

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This revolutionary robot has the potential to accelerate the chemical discovery of molecules for pharmaceuticals as well as many other applications.

Chemists from the University of Amsterdam have developed an AI-driven robot meant to accelerate chemical discovery for the pharmaceutical industry. The robot (the functions using a machine learning unit) is named RoboChem, and it outperforms human chemists in speed and accuracy while displaying a high level of innovation.

According to Innovation News Network, RoboChem is a precise and reliable chemist that can perform a variety of reactions while producing minimal amounts of waste. Professor Timothy Noël who led the study explained that the RoboChem can perform in a single week what would take a PhD student several months.

The system reportedly delivers results quickly and even provides the settings for scaleup, which means that chemical discovery can be accelerated for the pharmaceutical industry.

RoboChem was also used to replicate previous research published in four randomly selected papers, the team found that in 80% of the cases the system produced better results, while for the other 20% the results were similar. “This leaves me with no doubt that an AI-assisted approach will be beneficial to chemical discovery in the broadest possible sense,” said Noël.

RoboChem is also relevant for the generation of high-quality data. Noël explained that while only a few molecules are thoroughly researched in traditional chemical discovery, RoboChem produces a complete and comprehensive dataset where all relevant parameters are obtained for each individual molecule.

Another important advantage of the system is that it also records negative data. Most current scientific practice only publishes data of successful experiments. The data of a failed experiment is also very important, and RoboChem is going to change that by recording all data- successful and failed.