Robots and light run a lab around the clock, making drug candidates on their own

Making a new medicine starts with making molecules — hundreds of near-identical variants, mixed, tested and compared by hand. Professor Yoonsu Park's team at KAIST in South Korea has built a platform that hands that grind to machines: a dispensing robot, automated pumps, visible light and analysis equipment run the chemistry from mixing to checking results, day and night, with no manual handling. Published in the journal JACS Au, the team used a single-atom editing trick to turn furans into N-methyl pyrroles — a building block found in many drugs — across more than 20 compounds, and showed the system can run continuously to make more. Faster, more reliable molecule-making means promising drug candidates can be found sooner.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation