Drugs on demand: an automated synthesis platform

Developing new pharmaceuticals is extremely expensive, partly due to the cost of synthesizing millions of candidate drugs to be tested. This process could be accelerated dramatically by synthesizing nanoliters of the drug in tiny devices called microfluidic reactors (as opposed to synthesizing the candidates one at a time in a laboratory) but ordinary microfluidic devices are only useful for one reaction; fabricating new devices for each reaction is therefore of limited benefit. The alternative proposed here is a reconfigurable device that can be used for any reaction. It can create multiple arbitrary reaction channels which can each be independently temperature-controlled, and it can also monitor the reaction using a built-in spectrometer. The channels themselves squeeze the liquids along, meaning no external pumps are needed and many reactions can be carried out in parallel on the same device. Finally, because the system is automated, it can optimize the reaction without supervision.