Combining AI and Automation in the SynFini™ Platform to Accelerate Small Molecule Drug Discovery

The rate of chemical discovery and development is hampered by the fact that chemistry is still inherently a manual process, both in conducting reactions in the lab and reporting results in the written literature. Both are subject to the skill of the practitioner and the next chemist who attempts to reproduce their reported results. In an effort to improve and accelerate the reproducibility and transferability of chemistry, we have developed an automation platform named SynFini™ that automates the design, reaction screening and optimization (RSO), and production of target molecules.

SynFini includes three core components. A computational tool, SynRoute, develops synthetic strategies for molecules of interest. Routes to target molecules are built by combining knowledge of known chemistry from reaction databases and new reactions predicted by machine learning. A high throughput RSO platform, SynJet, enabled by inkjet printing uses statistical design of experiment (DoE) to validate these strategies. Automated analysis of the RSO results facilitates the preparation of digital synthesis protocols that can be downloaded to a bench top multistep synthesizer, called AutoSyn. AutoSyn is a flow chemistry workstation capable of performing synthesis routes at the milligram to gram scale while automatically capturing all synthesis parameters in real-time into a new automated chemistry reaction database.

To accelerate multi-parametric optimization in drug discovery, artificial intelligence (AI) can be included to aid in the design, selection and prioritization of target structures with desired properties, such as biological activity and ADMET properties, and can be interfaced with SynFini automated synthesis and bioassay testing for rapid ‘design-make-test’ cycles. We are also using the core SynFini components for process development to provide synthetic route and kinetic data to create ‘digital twin’ computer models of continuous manufacturing systems for APIs that enable direct translation of scale-up from bench to multi-kg/hr production in one step.

Register for this webinar to hear about how the SynFini tools work independently and then how they fit together into seamless AI-data driven automated solutions for drug discovery and process development are presented.

Speaker

Nathan Collins, Chief Strategy Officer, SRI Biosciences, A Division of SRI International

Nathan Collins is responsible for the discovery and translation of strategic research and development programs at SRI International’s (SRI) Biosciences Division into advanced platforms that have societal and commercial impact. He has built a growing pipeline of several cutting-edge technologies in SRI Biosciences that are innovating drug discovery and development. Nathan is currently leading SRI’s SynFini™ program combining AI guided data interpretation and decision making with fully automated research to streamline discovery and development of high impact products such as drugs, diagnostics and industrial chemicals.

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