Beilstein J. Org. Chem. 2016, 12, 2776–2783.
strates the unique versatility of the current generation of open- Acknowledgements
source consumer robotic equipment to be modified for use in The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the
laboratory automation. Using this synthesis robot we were able EPSRC (Grant Nos EP/H024107/1, EP/I033459/1, EP/
to synthesise the popular drug ibuprofen on three different reac- J00135X/1, EP/J015156/1, EP/K021966/1, EP/K023004/1, EP/
tion scales using a piece of custom software to control the pa- K038885/1, EP/L015668/1, EP/L023652/1), 318671
rameters of the synthesis. Future developments in this field MICREAGENTS), ERC (project 670467 SMART-POM) and
could include the development of further open source solutions the Royal-Society Wolfson Foundation for a Merit Award. The
to allow robotic platforms to perform more of the routine func- Authors would like to thank Dr. David France and Dr. Pooja
tions of chemical synthesis such as work-up and purification Aggarwal for their input into developing the ibuprofen synthe-
routines. The widespread use of such low-cost automation of tic approach.
chemical synthesis could allow the development of an ‘open
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Supporting information is available containing full
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