Fly-by-Wire Chemistry
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| License | CC Attribution - NoDerivatives 4.0 International: You are free to use, copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
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00:00
ChemistryCooperativitySteam distillationMolecularityOrganische ChemieSystemic therapyCollectingPharmacySetzen <Verfahrenstechnik>ChemistryPilot experimentProcess (computing)Man pageFunctional groupBy-productStuffingSolventSea levelWalkingPotenz <Homöopathie>MoleculeYield (engineering)Abzug <Chemisches Labor>Chemical reactionChemical compoundLibrary (computing)AreaOceanBiosynthesisThermoformingMedical historyIslandResinSpectroscopyVolumetric flow rateFumarsäureComputer animationMeeting/Interview
05:50
MoleculeProcess (computing)StiffnessSystems biologyPharmacySetzen <Verfahrenstechnik>LactitolChemistryTiermodellWalkingCholesterolCupcakeChemical reactionWine tasting descriptorsChemical propertySynthetic oilAnilineChemical compoundTopicityPharmaceutical drugChemische IndustrieSystemic therapyElectronic cigaretteFormaldehydeRiver sourceWaterOperonAnnulationMeeting/Interview
11:34
Computer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
So, Lee Cronin, it's great to have you here, professor at the University of Glasgow. By the way, what does Westcam mean? It's the cooperation between Strathclyde and Glasgow and a few other institutions on the west side of Scotland to maximize sharing of students, training, facilities.
00:21
Why is it Westcam? Because of the west coast? There's an Eastcam and a Westcam. Really? The Eastcam is in Edinburgh? Edinburgh and St Andrews and Heriot-Watt. I see. So you're an organic chemist at the university and you're synthesizing organic compounds using robots.
00:41
So you are really a fan from making chemistry from the workbench to the database. So digitization of data is a key word. So what's the workflow? So in terms of digitizing chemistry, what I wanted to try and do is to take the, because chemistry is really practical.
01:05
Chemists are actually working at the bench and using their skills to make molecules. They're like, I mean, almost like a cook. So the workflow is really not to make a database of molecular codes or structures, but to find out how I can digitize the practical process of making molecules,
01:21
put that into a code, and then allow that code to be used either by another human being elsewhere, another expert, or semi-automatically by a robot. So the workflow would be to record the process of the chemistry and the outcomes, to then kind of distill that in some way, and then to give that in a format that can be used by either the chemist or the automated system
01:43
to play back the process and then to produce the molecule. Yeah, but currently you have a lot of stuff, a lot of researchers doing these things by hand. Would this robotics mean that you would substitute a lot of hands and the boring stuff is done by robots?
02:02
And what is then done by the chemist, by the scientists? So that's a really important question. So my vision is, I mean, obviously we want to upgrade the experience of the researcher. So the researchers are very highly trained. We spend a lot of money training them, yet in the chemistry lab we maybe make them do quite manual work for many hours per day.
02:23
So the idea by automating the bits that are error-prone and repetitive, we can get the researcher to focus on new targets, maybe start to think about how to develop new techniques that are maybe new to the chemist, but probably most exciting, to build molecules that the chemist is beyond reach right now.
02:41
So the average organic chemist can do fantastic chemistry, but they get tired. If the automation can allow them to go further, to reproduce in higher yield what they need, to maximize their time, then they can discover more. And I think you agree with me, there's vast chemical space. Only in the last few hundred years, the chemical library and the number of molecules
03:04
really is quite small compared to the space available. So the chemist is never going to be redundant. They're just going to be allowed to explore much more exciting space. Yeah, I see. So this would also mean that all the robots must comprise of the whole bunch of toolboxes you have handy as a chemist.
03:24
I mean, you have a collection of methodologies and techniques, and I also guess that this number is more or less restricted, which is the toolbox, and then you build your compounds, new compounds, and the robots need to have all these techniques incorporated, don't they?
03:45
To some degree, but I think there's a number of steps. I mean, all the way out. What we are not proposing to do is to replace the researcher. We want to give the researcher a level of automation so they can reproduce and discover and also maybe use spectroscopy in a slightly new way to make decisions
04:02
and speed up the decision-making process. So it's not just about entire automation. It's about shifting the view from rather than working out what solvents to use for the synthesis, maybe to work out, can I now turn my byproducts into products? Whereas before, you wanted to minimize byproducts.
04:20
Now one idea I've got in my group is like, let's just do reactions that give maximum number of byproducts. And everyone's like, what? Basically make the biggest mess we can, and then by almost like using kind of like a chemical autopilot to say, right, we want this byproduct. Let's focus on optimizing that to 100%, decreasing the others, and then right, done that one, we go in that one, go to the next byproduct.
04:43
And so if we can make reactions or investigate reactions that are classically ignored because they're so messy, but by using computer control, we can basically focus on make them pure, then we have many more options. So I think using automation is not about just replacing. It's about going to those areas of chemical space that beyond the human being.
05:03
It's a bit like fly-by-wire aircraft. Some airplanes now are so fly-by-wire, if you took the computer away, they would fall out the sky because the pilot cannot make enough adjustments. So can I have fly-by-wire chemistry? Huh, we just invented a new term. Wait. Fly-by-wire, we can publish the paper in your journal.
05:22
Yeah, okay. The Bichon journal, for example. Yeah, that's a good idea. So I'm really surprised to hear that the use of robots in the chemical lab is more or less unusual. I mean, I'm my biologist. I knew it from the biological sciences. It's normal because it can replace the boring world.
05:41
So why is it that unusual in chemical labs? I think there are a number of reasons. Probably the first one is cultural. People are used to having power over their fumehood and organizing themselves. The second might be safety. Biological operations, although they can be unsafe,
06:00
they tend to be in water, nothing's going to explode, there's no tox issues. Of course, there are genetic issues, there are tox issues and so on, but biologists are used to those anyway. And I think the third thing is really the chemist is maybe not so comfortable with the flexibility. The chemist is much more flexible than the robot.
06:24
And the biologist, the techniques that are developed are much more amenable to automation. So I think what we have to try and do is convince the chemist to adopt a little bit more uniform approach to their chemistry so we can help them automate it. But that requires the culture to change.
06:43
So I think the cultural shift is the biggest thing and of course the next biggest thing of more importance day to day is safety. And perhaps the last thing is finance. A lot of chemical automation is seen to be quite expensive.
07:00
And that's why I started to introduce the concept of a 3D printer, not to 3D print molecules, but a 3D printer is really a cheap robot that you can then retask to do other things flexibly. And then to ask the chemist, view the 3D printer as a robot you can reprogram, but it's much cheaper than maybe say an equivalent liquid handling system, which may cost maybe a hundred times more.
07:22
So affordability then comes in. So I think there's culture, safety, affordability, and then being a little bit less flexible. But if you're a little bit less flexible you can then do more. So when we talk about digitization, you also need to talk about data exchange formats?
07:41
I think in the end, one dream I have is like, I could phone you up and give you the inchy key for cholesterol, right? And you could convert that to cholesterol and draw cholesterol. And then I could give you the inchy key, let's say for, I don't know, aniline, right? Or some other simple looking molecule. And again, you could draw it and say, right, cholesterol is clearly more complicated than aniline.
08:03
Now if I give you the methodology to make a molecule and look at the number of lines of synthetic code required to make the molecule, I'm really interested in developing reactions which make complex molecules with a very small number of lines of code.
08:21
And then going, oh well, it's actually harder to draw the molecule than it is to draw the code to make the molecule. So then what becomes more important? The molecular descriptor or the code to make the molecule? Because if I phoned you up and said, please draw a picture of my, let's say a wedding cake, it's really complicated, and you drew it,
08:40
and I just gave you the recipe to make the wedding cake, you might go, oh, I will just bake the cake. So I want to get the chemist to think about making the molecule, not just exchanging the data format. So the data format is, of course, important. But if the data format is more a digital code for making the molecule rather than expressing the molecule, which is more efficient to use?
09:01
So what we are talking about actually is about a code that includes the metadata, it's a running topic of this meeting, and what you're also looking for is a kind of a systems biology markup language, biologists do have something like this, and this would be an option for you to trigger such a markup language that incorporates
09:23
the metadata together with maybe reactions, and at the end, even the results, the compound you're looking for. So I certainly think that there needs to be a programming approach to digitizing chemistry, and we have things that we're both doing in the laboratory
09:42
and also in collaboration with commercial providers, ways of starting to trigger that, and there's a really interesting question about how do we develop an HTML for chemistry, whether it be markup or something else, it doesn't matter, but the key thing is to enable chemists to exchange the practical process of making molecules more efficiently,
10:02
and then, you know what, there may be collaboration will actually have commercial benefits as well. So if you look at the music industry, the music industry and chemists were very similar, and the musicians wanted to hold on to their intellectual property as much as possible, but then monetize it in the right way. So the next step for the chemical community
10:20
is also to enable efficient monetization and openness, and bring those together. Okay, great. So it's still a long way to go, I guess? I think the change is upon us. I don't think it's as long as you think, but I'm hesitating to put a time on it,
10:40
because whenever you do that, everyone says, you said it was five years away. I think significance steps will be made right now. The point I'd like to finish making is that digitization has impacted music and video and production of items dramatically. The business models are there, and the open access models are there. I would love the chemists to basically break the barrier
11:02
to allow chemistry to be digitized, and then we can look at how mistakes were made in the digital revolution of other things, and use that to provide personal medicine, to enable the poorest people in the world to get access to medicine that they wouldn't get access to,
11:21
to drive customization, innovation in the chemical company, to disrupt manufacturing, and really, the thing I want to do most is discover new molecules that may have profound importance, and tell me something new about the universe.
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