Scientists make digital breakthrough in chemistry that could revolutionize the drug industry

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/24/how-a-digital-breakthrough-could-revolutionize-drug-industry.html

In June, the U.S. government purchased the vast majority of world’s supply of remdesivir—a FDA-approved antiviral treatment for Covid-19—for July through September. Gilead, the company that makes the compound, recently announced that it would meet international demand by the end of October.

A dozen such chemical computers or “chemputers” sit in the University of Glasgow lab of Lee Cronin, the chemist who designed the bird’s nest of tubing, pumps, and flasks, and wrote the remdesivir code that runs on it. He’s spent years dreaming of a future where researchers can distribute and produce molecules as easily as they email and print PDFs, making not being able to order a drug as archaic as not being able to locate a modern text.

Cronin and his colleagues described their machine’s capability to produce multiple molecules last year, and now they’ve taken a second major step toward digitizing chemistry with an accessible way to program with the machine. Their software turns academic papers into chemputer-executable programs that researchers can edit without learning to code, they announced earlier this month.