Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Accelerated Formulations Engineering (CAFE)

疫苗、油漆、燃料、化妆品、染料、塑料包装和许多其他产品都是配方：一种或多种活性成分与其他辅助成分混合或化学包装。 成功的产品取决于精心设计的配方，以满足多种设计要求：储存和运输期间的稳定性，成本，安全性，环境影响等。一系列因素，如采用可持续来源的成分或出现新的疾病，创造了对新配方的不断需求。这样的公式很难发展。成分可以以复杂的方式相互作用，数据集通常是有限的，因此很难在没有试验和错误的情况下了解配方的特性。 随着配料表的增加，成分组合的方式也越来越多，这使得挑战更加复杂。这使得配方开发成为将新产品推向市场的最令人烦恼、最耗时、最昂贵的步骤之一。克服这一挑战，为更快、更可靠的配方开发创造一个范例，将带来新产品，加速美国制造业的发展。我们看到了一条从根本上改变配方开发的道路，这条道路得到了一项新的努力的支持，即加速配方工程中心（CAFE）。这将培育和建立在人工智能（AI）和化学科学交叉领域的最新融合研究的基础上，同时响应社会对新配方，监管，制造和业务发展的需求。在此，我们提出了一系列致力于沿着沿着这条道路推进的研讨会，其中心思想是让来自学术界、工业界、咨询公司和监管机构的利益相关者参与进来，考虑如何利用机器学习、人工智能和高通量合成和表征方面的最新进展来减轻配方开发负担。将围绕公共和个人健康、农业和食品这三个中心主题组织具有广泛代表性的演讲者和与会者参加的研讨会。这将汇集一个跨学科的研究人员团队，开始团队建设，以制定将于2022年提交的完整工程研究中心提案。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响进行评估，被认为值得支持。审查标准。

Vaccines, paint, fuels, cosmetics, dyes, plastic packaging, and many other products are formulations: one or more active ingredients mixed or chemically packaged with other supporting ingredients. Successful products depend on carefully crafted formulations to meet multiple design requirements: stability during storage and transportation, cost, safety, environmental impact, and others. A range of factors, such as adoption of sustainably sourced ingredients or emergence of new diseases, create a constant need for new formulations. Such formulations are hard to develop. Ingredients can interact in a complex way and datasets are often limited, making it difficult to know a formulations’ properties without trial and error. Compounding the challenge, the number of ways that ingredients can be combined becomes enormous as the ingredient list grows. This makes formulation development one of the most vexing, time-consuming, and costly steps in bringing a new product to market. Overcoming this challenge to create a paradigm for faster and more reliable formulation development would lead to new products and accelerate US manufacturing.We see a path toward radically transforming formulation development, supported by a new effort, the Center for Accelerated Formulation Engineering (CAFE). This would nurture and build on recent convergence research at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and the chemical sciences, while being responsive to societal need for new formulations, regulation, manufacturing and business development. Here, we propose a series of workshops devoted to advancing along this path. The central idea is to engage stakeholders from academia, industry, consultancies, and regulatory agencies into considering how recent advances in machine learning, AI, and high-throughput synthesis and characterization can all be leveraged to mitigate the formulation-development burden. Workshops with diverse and broadly representative speakers and attendees will be organized around the three central themes of Public and Personal Health, Agriculture and Food. This would bring together an interdisciplinary team of researchers to begin teambuilding for a full Engineering Research Center proposal to be submitted in 2022.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.