Miracle Machine Built Molecules On Demand

Abstract

This year saw the advent of a new type of automated synthesizer that, with the push of a button, could produce a broad range of drugs, molecular probes, and molecular electronic components. Martin D. Burke of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and coworkers developed the exotic-looking machine, which uses common chemical reactions to assemble modular building blocks into targeted organic molecules on demand (Science 2015, DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa5414). A company cofounded by Burke, Revolution Medicines, has already improved the technology and is using it for drug discovery. “The synthesis and purification of small organic molecules are still hard to automate,” comments Kenichiro Itami of Nagoya University. “Almost all synthetic chemists, including myself, have been dreaming to achieve this because it will offer significant opportunities to rapidly identify functional small molecules.” Burke’s synthesizer was designed to use organic building blocks his group developed containing boronic acids pr...