Anna Forrester
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is seeking potential partners who will provide expertise for various fields of study in support of DARPA’s efforts to develop automated chemical synthesizer for molecule production.
DARPA said Wednesday the Make-It program seeks support from experts in the fields of analytical chemistry, chemical engineering, computational chemistry, mathematics, process engineering, synthetic organic chemistry and manufacturing.
“The vision for Make-It is to create an automated synthesizer that produces a wide variety of complex small molecules at production scale in weeks instead of years,” said Tyler McQuade, program manager at DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office.
“A system that can automate the design and testing of specific chemical routes, keeping track of both success and failures, will usher in the next phase of synthetic discovery.”
DARPA wants the program’s findings to also benefit other scientific disciplines than chemistry, as well as to bolster reproducibility of data and facilitate what the agency calls “greener” synthesis.
