Adaptive Optimization of Chemical Reactions with Minimal Experimental Information
Optimizing reaction conditions depends on expert chemistry knowledge and laborious exploration of reaction parameters. To automate this task and augment chemical intuition, we here report a computational tool to navigate search spaces. Our approach (LabMate.ML) integrates random sampling of 0.03%–0.04% of all search space as input data with an interpretable, adaptive machine-learning algorithm. LabMate.ML can optimize many real-valued and categorical reaction parameters simultaneously, with minimal computational resources and time. In nine prospective proof-of-concept studies pursuing distinctive objectives, we demonstrate how LabMate.ML can identify optimal goal-oriented conditions for several different chemistries and substrates. Double-blind competitions and the conducted expert surveys reveal that its performance is competitive with that of human experts. LabMate.ML does not require specialized hardware, affords quantitative and interpretable reactivity insights, and autonomously formalizes chemical intuition, thereby providing an innovative framework for informed, automated experiment selection toward the democratization of synthetic chemistry. ; D.R. is a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow (grant nos. P2EZP3_168827 and P300P2_177833). E.A.H. is supported by the Herchel Smith Fellowship awarded by Williams College. G.J.L.B. is a Royal Society URF (URF\R\180019). T.R. is an Investigador Auxiliar supported by FCT Portugal (CEECIND/00887/2017). T.R. acknowledges the H2020 (TWINN-2017 ACORN, grant no. 807281), FCT/FEDER (02/SAICT/2017, grant no. 28333). D.R. acknowledges the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the MIT SenseTime coalition for funding. The authors are extremely grateful to several colleagues for suggesting Ugi reaction conditions, and to Prof. R. Langer and Prof. G. Traverso, who provided invaluable comments on the research and manuscript. The authors are indebted to Prof. R. Moreira for access to the CEM microwave reactor; Dr. F. Corzana for technical assistance with HRMS; and the 13 graduate ...