The hunt is on, according to the U.S. government, for a way to track down and obtain military molecules that quickly meet Defense Department needs, reports Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.
The Accelerated Molecular Discovery program, announced by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, aims to take the ordinary research and test cycle to identify new molecules up to hyperspeed.
"The ultimate goal of AMD is to speed the time to design, validate, and optimize new molecules with defined properties from several years to a few months, or even several weeks," explained Anne Fischer, a manager in the agency's Defense Sciences Office.
"We aim to develop the AI tools, models and experimental systems to enable autonomous design of molecules to quickly meet DoD needs."
The focus is on the military capabilities, "from developing safe chemical warfare agent simulants and medicines to counter emerging threats, to coatings, dyes, and specialty fuels for advanced performance," the agency reports.
The standard current procedure is just too slow.
"Current approaches to develop molecules for specific applications … are intuition-driven, mired in slow iterative design and test cycles, and ultimately limited by the specific molecular expertise of the chemist who has to test each candidate molecule by hand," the agency explains.
So the new program was launched to speech up discovery and "optimization" of molecules.
It calls for researchers to build closed systems with artificial intelligence that automatically extract existing chemistry data from research documents and do the experiments – the measurements and optimization – and end up with "physics-based representations and predictive tools."
For the rest of this report, and more, please go to Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.