The combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and robots has opened the door to finding new chemical substances quickly and precisely. Research processes that used to take years can now be completed in a few days, and the expense of analyzing thousands of experiments can be greatly reduced.
The Institute for Basic Science (IBS) AI·robot-based synthesis research group said on the 25th that it developed a platform that automatically performs about 1,000 chemical experiments a day and precisely analyzes the results, in a paper published in the international journal Nature. Director General Bartosz A. Grzybowski, who led the research, has served since 2014 as a distinguished professor in the School of Natural Sciences at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) and as an IBS research Director General.
In textbooks, chemical reactions are simple, like "when A meets B, it becomes C." But in actual experiments, completely different results can appear depending on temperature or concentration. The team began this study to find a way to view such complex processes at a glance like a map.
The researchers adopted a method in which a robot automatically carries out thousands of reactions a day and AI analyzes the results. Thanks to this, they could view the entire reaction process at a glance without checking each complex condition one by one. They also discovered hidden reaction pathways and new substances that were hard to find with conventional experiments.
Re-examining the Hantzsch pyridine reaction, widely used to synthesize raw materials for antibiotics and anticancer drugs, they also identified nine new substances that had not previously been known. The Hantzsch pyridine reaction is a representative organic reaction in which multiple components react simultaneously to synthesize pyridine, the basic framework of pharmaceuticals.
They also tested 756 metal combinations of a "Prussian blue analogue," a secondary battery material, identified more efficient combinations, and additionally obtained four new substances in the process.
The biggest advantages of the AI·robot platform are speed and expense reduction. With conventional methods, each of the thousands of experiments would have to be analyzed with expensive equipment, but the newly developed approach can organize results with a single analysis, reducing the expense by dozens of times. The team noted that a path has opened to selectively produce desired substances by simply changing conditions going forward.
Director General Grzybowski said, "Viewing chemical reactions not as a straight line but as a network will be an important turning point for chemical research going forward," adding, "By leveraging AI and robots, we expect to greatly boost the efficiency and diversity of chemical synthesis and contribute to future new drug development and materials innovation."
References
Nature (2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09490-1