Chemputer Trial at NIH-NCATS Advances Collaborative Automation Efforts
As part of the ongoing collaboration between the Cronin Group and the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NIH-NCATS), PhD students Nathan Jiscoot and Dominika Urbanczyk visited the NCATS facility in Rockville, Maryland to support the installation and testing of a ChemPU platform. The visits focused on adapting a manually executed four-step synthetic route—previously unscaled—to an automated workflow using the ChemPU system.The synthesis targeted an analogue of a drug building block reported to reduce inflammation and mitigate traumatic brain injury pathology with improved selectivity [Mason et al., Redox Biol. 2023, 60, 102611]. The visit demonstrated the strength of the XDL programming language in capturing complex workflows, highlighting its potential to support integrated chemical automation.