In June, CAS—a division of the American Chemical Society that specializes in scientific knowledge management—announced that its scientific content and CAS Newton, an agentic artificial intelligence, are now embedded into five popular chemistry workflow tools. This is the first wave of collaborations aimed at enhancing chemical-research efficiency.
“We’re building a future where chemists spend their time inventing, not fighting their tools,” Nick Talken, CEO and cofounder of Albert Invent, says in the press release.
Chemistry workflow tools come in many forms, including electronic lab notebooks and laboratory information management systems. Previously, users had to leave these tools to search the CAS repository for peer-reviewed scientific literature for prior art, safety data, synthesis routes, and other scientific information. Users then had to manually transfer the CAS data back into the workflow tools. “With these integrations, a user can, within their workflow, directly search for information in a CAS product or ask a question of CAS Newton,” explains Andrea Jacobs, CAS director of AI.
CAS Newton, launched in April, is a conversational agentic AI designed for scientific investigation. It uses the scientific content curated by CAS scientists to help scientists complete tasks such as optimizing lead-compound structures and predicting spectra and functional-group reactivities. “CAS Newton is a very sophisticated agentic AI interfaced to trusted scientific information,” Jacobs says. User queries are not used to train CAS Newton, and the agent contains several layers of checks designed to filter out hallucinations, she says.
The five collaborators announced so far are Albert Invent, Sapio Sciences, Inductive Bio, Scilligence, and Wolfram Research. These companies have tools that support research in the life sciences, drug discovery, and academia. “We’re expecting many more partners to come on line in the coming months,” Jacobs says.
For the purpose of these collaborations, the CAS Content Collection, whose information spans over 150 years of scientific advancement, and search capabilities, like CAS Newton, are packaged under the umbrella term CAS Connections. “CAS Connections is a surface for all the things that CAS provides through our existing products and services. In the future, we may bring on line additional capabilities through CAS Connections, but right now it’s a new delivery vehicle for [existing products],” Jacobs says.
