Computer Vision for Analytical Chemistry (CVAC): Scalable Productivity for Chemical Manufacturing

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KEYWORDS: chemistry, catalysis, image processing, manufacturing, productivity, EPSRC.The digital eyes of cameras paint the colourful worlds we can and cannot see by numbers. These numbers have the power to help us make life-changing medicines on timescales that, at the present time, we cannot imagine.This research and leadership programme focusses on developing the analytical power of digital cameras to improve the productivity and safety of chemical manufacturing.The Pharmaceutical sector is the UK's second largest in terms of income, but it is an extremely costly business to run. This cost burden hits at the heart of one of the UK's biggest challenges: our lack of productive output versus hours worked compared with other nations. To this point, 'Big Pharma' stands to realise a >£1bn reduction in R&D cost by 2030, but only if the efficiency with which it can discover new medicines can be improved by a third beyond the current state of the art. How can we make new medicines more productively? Fast adoption of digital technologies is vital. As linked to the core of the proposed research, digital technology adoption should include the amazing ability of cameras to tell the story of the world, not in words, but in useful numbers.In Big Pharma, to understand whether or not the chemical process of making a medicine is safe to use on the manufacturing scale, we need to be able to analyse the chemical process in real time. The better we analyse a process on the small scale, the better its chances of being used productively to make medicines on the large scale. However, many useful reactions are never applied in industry because they do not meet the strict criteria for safe application on the manufacturing scale. This is an unsolved problem, and no current chemical monitoring technologies can seamlessly analyse chemical processes on small lab scale, large plant scale, and in dangerous environments. If such a monitoring technology were available, it has the potential to lead to an up-to 9:1 return on investment, moving us closer to the ultimate goal of improving research productivity by a full third.Computer Vision is the science of digitally quantifying real-world objects using cameras. It is a vibrant area of research with a rich history in astronomy, land surveys, autonomous systems, food safety, defence and security, and art forensics, among other areas. Whilst 'photo-style' camera analysis has been used over the past decade, new and unique methods of using real-time camera-based chemical monitoring is still hugely underdeveloped across chemical manufacturing, despite the wealth of emerging knowledge from seemingly unrelated scientific disciplines. The untapped technology of camera-enabled reaction monitoring thus holds remarkable fundamental research potential. A new research programme in this area would contribute strongly to UK chemical manufacturing, realising significant and digitally-adoptive increases in productivity 2-3 years ahead of current 2030 targets.This ambitious research programme will deliver a world-leading suite of new camera-enabled analytics for understanding a wide range of valuable chemical processes to make them safer and more productive on scale. The research leader has an emerging track record which has already directed step-changes in homogeneous catalyst design, reaction kinetics platforms, safety software systems, and industrial technology translation. Bordering chemistry and computer Science, this programme will deliver research excellence in video analysis methods for visible and invisible chemical processes, across all scales of chemical development, and in a wide range of chemistries beyond the core focus of improving productivity in Pharmaceutical development.