Using Machine Learning To Predict Suitable Conditions for Organic Reactions

Reaction condition recommendation is an essential element for the realization of computer-assisted synthetic planning. Accurate suggestions of reaction conditions are required for experimental validation and can have a significant effect on the success or failure of an attempted transformation. However, de novo condition recommendation remains a challenging and under-explored problem and relies heavily on chemists’ knowledge and experience. In this work, we develop a neural-network model to predict the chemical context (catalyst(s), solvent(s), reagent(s)), as well as the temperature most suitable for any particular organic reaction. Trained on ∼10 million examples from Reaxys, the model is able to propose conditions where a close match to the recorded catalyst, solvent, and reagent is found within the top-10 predictions 69.6% of the time, with top-10 accuracies for individual species reaching 80–90%. Temperature is accurately predicted within ±20 °C from the recorded temperature in 60–70% of test cases, with higher accuracy for cases with correct chemical context predictions. The utility of the model is illustrated through several examples spanning a range of common reaction classes. We also demonstrate that the model implicitly learns a continuous numerical embedding of solvent and reagent species that captures their functional similarity.