At the forefront of new synthetic endeavors, such as drug discovery or natural product synthesis, large quantities of material are rarely available and timelines are tight. A miniaturized automation platform enabling high-throughput experimentation for synthetic route scouting to identify conditions for preparative reaction scale-up would be a transformative advance. Because automated, miniaturized chemistry is difficult to carry out in the presence of solids or volatile organic solvents, most of the synthetic "toolkit" cannot be readily miniaturized. Using palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions as a test case, we developed automation-friendly reactions to run in dimethyl sulfoxide at room temperature. This advance enabled us to couple the robotics used in biotechnology with emerging mass spectrometry-based high-throughput analysis techniques. More than 1500 chemistry experiments were carried out in less than a day, using as little as 0.02 milligrams of material per reaction.

Applications of aerobic oxidation methods in pharmaceutical manufacturing are limited, in part, because mixtures of oxygen gas and organic solvents often create the potential for a flammable atmosphere. To address this issue, limiting oxygen concentration (LOC) values, which define the minimum partial pressure of oxygen that supports a combustible mixture, have been measured for nine commonly used organic solvents at elevated temperature and pressure. The solvents include acetic acid, N-methyl pyrrolidone, dimethyl sulfoxide, t-amyl alcohol, ethyl acetate, 2-methyltetrahydrofuran, methanol, acetonitrile, and toluene. The data obtained from these studies help define safe operating conditions for the use of oxygen with organic solvents.

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A microtube screening approach affords simple and convenient assessment of the selective adsorption of metal impurities by a variety of different process adsorbents. This approach is helpful in identifying rapid solutions to metal impurity problems in pharmaceutical process research. Several examples illustrating the utility of the approach are presented.

Microfluidic droplet sorting enables the high‐throughput screening and selection of water‐in‐oil microreactors at speeds and volumes unparalleled by traditional well‐plate approaches. Most such systems sort using fluorescent reporters on modified substrates or reactions that are rarely industrially relevant. We describe a microfluidic system for high‐throughput sorting of nanoliter droplets based on direct detection using electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI‐MS). Droplets are split, one portion is analyzed by ESI‐MS, and the second portion is sorted based on the MS result. Throughput of 0.7 samples s−1 is achieved with 98 % accuracy using a self‐correcting and adaptive sorting algorithm. We use the system to screen ≈15 000 samples in 6 h and demonstrate its utility by sorting 25 nL droplets containing transaminase expressed in vitro. Label‐free ESI‐MS droplet screening expands the toolbox for droplet detection and recovery, improving the applicability of droplet sorting to protein engineering, drug discovery, and diagnostic workflows.

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