Alastair Florence and colleagues report on the use of an automatic reactor platform from ChemSpeed (1) to accelerate the crystallization of organic molecules (2):

The principal gain over manual crystallization stems from the fact that automation enhances productivity, allowing the search for physical forms to be conducted systematically and reproducibly over a finer grid (e.g. larger solvent library) than might be accessible manually, increasing the probability of observing new forms. In practise, making due time allowance for set-up, sample retrieval and cleaning between experiments, experience has shown that 32 crystallizations per working day is sustainable. Further opportunity for productivity enhancement comes from integration of the platform control PC with an electronic laboratory information management system (LIMS) to provide effective archival, search and retrieval facilities for the recorded control parameters associated with large numbers of crystallizations.

Although High Throughput Synthesis (HTS) has become an integral part of the drug discovery process in companies, larger libraries generally come at a cost to purity and full product characterization.(3) There is still much room available to adopt more automation to the practice of organic chemistry, especially in academic labs. Koppitz and Eis predict (3):

Aside from the technology, we are now entering an era in which chemists working in AMC (Automated Medicinal Chemistry) will probably become more chemistry-oriented than they have been in the past decade, when the focus was on developing and implementing a robust and reliable technology platform. In this context, more chemistry related challenges, such as the discovery and exploitation of new structural motifs in chemical space, development of new chemistries and their application in library synthesis, will hopefully be addressed and solved.

This signal points to more involvement by academia into automating chemistry processes typically done manually. This is significant because there is a greater probability that results will be shared with the scientific community, compared to similar work done in industry.

Eventually it is possible that automation will enable even the open execution of chemistry experiments by leveraging crowdsourcing. (4)