SYNTHIA, a retrosynthesis platform built by Merck KGaA, is stepping into the spotlight on September 15, when Chemistry World is hosting a webinar comparing how the software performs on market compounds across pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals and flavours and fragrances.
Unlike most retrosynthesis tools that work as statistical predictors, SYNTHIA leans on expert coded reaction knowledge instead, working more like a digital chemist than a guessing machine. That's a distinction the company has pushed for years, and it's built around a catalog of more than 12 million commercially available starting materials and building blocks. SYNTHIA also recently launched a scaled down version called SYNTHIA Lab, aimed at academic groups and non profit research teams who could now access the same kind of retrosynthetic planning tools as bigger labs. Angelo Lanzilotto, who did his PhD at the University of Basel before working at Amgen Canada and Selvita, joined Merck KGaA's digital chemistry team in 2021 and will present the pharma and agrochemical side of things. And Emma, a technical applications manager who joined Merck KGaA back in 2018 after a PhD at Brown University , rounds out the session. It's a fairly niche corner of chemistry to build a whole hour around, but that's kind of the point, chemists rarely get to see one tool judged across three industries at once.
The webinar promises a look at how success rates shift with a molecule's physical properties, and how starting from commercial building blocks can shrink a route down to just one, two or three steps . Chiral centers matter too, the number a target molecule carries can drag down success rates once a certain threshold gets crossed. Organizers also plan to walk through the synthetic accessibility score, a metric meant to flag how hard or easy a molecule will be to make before anyone touches a flask. And this isn't the first time Chemistry World has run a SYNTHIA session, the software's commercial team under the MilliporeSigma name has been building out its licensing work since at least August 2017.
Comments