Drug Discovery and Medicinal Chemistry in the Era of Automation - Webinar Recap

On July 20th, Strateos hosted a webinar entitled Drug Discovery and Medicinal Chemistry in the Era of Automation. Daniel Rines, Ph.D., Sr. Director of R&D Strategy and Vince Yeh, Ph.D., Director of Chemistry of Strateos gave an interactive talk focused on how automated robotics and integrated software are powering self-driving labs that are revolutionizing synthetic chemistry to support medicinal chemistry workflows.

Join us September 15th 8am PST for Part 2 of our Chemistry Webinar Series highlighting our extended features with PerkinElmer. We will discuss the integration of the PerkinElmer Signals Notebook with Strateos’s powerful automated synthesis system to drive efficient synthesis of druglike compounds. To register for the webinar, click here.

To advance a lead candidate through to clinical trials in traditional small molecule pipelines, it can take on average 6+ years. Strateos’ goal is to automate many of the operations to enable a chemist to work on multiple programs at the same time in parallel, greatly improving the process efficiencies and shortening cycle times.

AUTOMATED MEDICINAL CHEMISTRY

From his previous years at Novartis, Vince recounts the bottlenecks in medicinal chemistry, which involved highly manual, time-intensive procedures (i.e., synthesizing and purifying compounds), whether in-house or outsourced, with non-standardized analog data capture.

“Strateos’ platform is an equalizer for the industry - democratizing access to sophisticated, automation tools that may have previously been restricted to large pharmaceutical companies with extensive capital." - Vince Yeh, Ph.D., Director of Chemistry, Strateos

Vince illustrated a typical user flow for medicinal chemistry via Strateos’ SmartLab Studio, which shows many efficiencies in the simplified workflow resulting from integration of synthesis design in an ELN to the Strateos Web Console to automated chemical synthesis, purification, and structural verification.

Several examples were presented to show how automation could rapidly optimize reaction conditions for the synthesis of several chemical compounds using a range of the most common single-step reactions used in the discovery synthetic medchem industry, including Buchwald, amide and Suzuki reactions. After purification and structural verification, the compound can be assayed via SmartLab Studio for functional testing, such as inhibition assays.

Vince sees the industrialization of MedChem happening at the right time to capitalize on advances in automation, software, and hardware to close the experimental loop, expedite testing, and increase throughput to overcome many existing roadblocks. The real advantage of machine-executed chemistry is the data moat generated and removal of human biases, which improves data accuracy and interoperability. As more data is acquired, Vince is excited to build out predictive AI models that can be combined with automated robotics to create autonomous discovery loops.

To view the Drug Discovery and Medicinal Chemistry in the Era of Automation in full, and learn how Strateos can help support your chemistry workflow, please click the video below:

For more information or a demonstration of Strateos’ capabilities, contact sales@strateos.com