Dow turns to AI to accelerate chemical search

For chemists, finding just the right molecule for a particular application can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. With several million compounds to choose from, chemists often must resort to intuition when trying to solve complex problems around chemical processes.

US multinational Dow Chemical was working with a pulp and paper manufacturer to improve inefficiencies in its chemical process with a goal of producing a better, safer pulp yield. But to hit that narrow target, Dow needed a faster, more thorough method of identifying candidate molecules. So it launched a collaboration with Chemical Abstract Services (CAS), a division of the American Chemistry Society, to leverage CAS SciFinder, which, unlike generic search engines, is optimized for searching for chemical molecules from an electronic catalog of more than 200 million compounds. 

The resulting project, SmarthSearch, has earned Dow a 2023 CIO 100 Award list for IT leadership and innovation, and now enables thousands of Dow chemists to discover needed molecules in minutes that once took weeks to identify.

“This is what caused us to go down the road of finding a faster way to search molecules through a database. That was the start of this project,” says Nathan Wilmot, IT director of data client partnerships in Dow’s enterprise data and analytics group. “The innovation here is previously [chemists] relied very heavily on intuition and thumbing through catalogs to identify molecules.”

With SmartSearch for Dow, Dow chemists can very quickly filter down the “chemical, physical, and commercial availability [of molecules, as well as the] health and safety properties for a molecule or set of molecules that might fit a given application” in a matter of minutes, he says.

In its pulp pilot, for example, CAS SciFinder helped Dow identify a set of 8 to 12 safer, more sustainable molecules as possible candidates to replace the existing material the manufacturer aimed to replace.