Martin Devenney

Symyx Technologies

The creation of vast numbers of compounds by reacting a set of components in a large number of possible combinations at once is referred to as combinatorial chemistry. Combinatorial techniques, which are widely accepted in the pharmaceutical area, are increasingly finding diverse applications in materials science. The underlying principles of the combinatorial approach are to synthesize "libraries" of large numbers of materials in microscale quantities, and then to screen thousands of these compounds quickly and reliably for a desired property to identify potential "lead" compounds. Combinatorial technologies accelerate the speed of research, maximize the opportunity for breakthroughs, and expand the amount of available information by orders of magnitude. By providing a tool for accessing vast amounts of chemical information, combinatorial technologies can accomplish in days what might take years using traditional research approaches. This dramatically increases the probability of success in the discovery process and in addition the use of parallel experiments enables the rapid optimization of a material for a specific application.