Software has identified more than 300 ways in which widely available chemical waste with no obvious use can be combined and converted into a range of drugs and fertilisers. The researchers behind the tool believe it will optimise the chemical industry and allow recycling of by-products that would otherwise need to be stored.
at US software and chemistry company Allchemy and his colleagues used their software, also known as Allchemy, to look for useful products from 189 small molecules that are regularly created as by-products of large-scale industrial processes around the world. An additional 56鈥塵olecules that are commonly created from chemical waste during recycling processes were also included.
The software created a vast database of all the possible combinations of chemicals, and all the processes that could be used to combine them. The Allchemy software, running on a single high-end server, took about a month to calculate the hundreds of billions of combinations. These were then narrowed down to only those processes that led to the creation of drugs, fertilisers or other useful molecules.
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Grzybowski says that all of the discovered processes could have been found by humans, eventually, but the vast scale of possible processes made them incredibly hard to spot. Among the discovered molecules were drugs to treat leprosy and heart disease, but Grzybowski says that his favourite result was an antibiotic that can be produced from lactate, which comes from waste plastic bottles, and phenol, a byproduct of coal mining.
鈥淚 was hoping to find aspirin or something, but it鈥檚 actually much more interesting than that,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t actually solves the problem of circular chemistry, pretty much in an exhaustive way.鈥�
Grzybowski had previously worked on projects to create new methods to synthesise specific molecules, but he says that this software works in the other direction; it takes a list of available resources and finds all the possible uses for them.
鈥淭his chemistry is pretty straightforward. The difficulty is in spotting the opportunity,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he building blocks are very simple, but when you start talking about 200 waste molecules, within one step of combinations you have 40,000 options. Exponentially it grows. The software tries everything.鈥�
Grzybowski says he hopes that Allchemy will eventually lead to a 鈥淭inder for molecules鈥�. Chemical companies could put in details of all of their available waste products, other companies could list molecules they would like to have synthesised for a specific purpose, and third parties could bid to perform the waste-to-drug synthesis. This would reduce waste from the global chemical supply chain and perhaps also lower the cost of drugs and other products.
Allchemy also allows further analysis based on the geographical location of chemical waste, so useful molecules that use waste gathered in one location can be preferred. All of the processes revealed by Allchemy are being released openly and not patented.
at the University of Surrey, UK, says identifying uses for chemical waste in the lab is useful, but scaling up that process may be more difficult.
鈥淪omething that鈥檚 developed in the lab needs to be translated in a profitable way into a large pilot scale,鈥� she says. 鈥淭he purity of that compound is important as well. If you can鈥檛 purify it enough to be useful, then there will be a problem.
鈥淚t鈥檚 good to identify the possibility of it, but then it鈥檚 down to the scientists and the researchers to look into ways of making that happen. It鈥檚 not going to happen overnight, but at least you start from somewhere.鈥�
Nature
