Project Grant R44GM163514

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences awarded $300,001 to Vivid Bioinnovations, PBC on August 4, 2026, under the Biomedical Research and Research Training program (CFDA 93.859) to develop an integrated micro-robotic screening platform for high-throughput chemical reaction optimization and artificial intelligence model training.

Vivid Bioinnovations will engineer a scalable platform combining micro-robotic nanoliter droplet dispensing with custom nanowell arrays and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry imaging to perform millions of parallel nanoliter-scale chemical reactions. The platform integrates dielectrophoretic steering to deposit droplets onto densely packed nanowell arrays under controlled incubation, followed by rapid MALDI-MS imaging to generate high-dimensional spectral fingerprints reflecting reaction outcomes. These datasets feed into a machine learning pipeline for dimensionality reduction, clustering, and regression analysis. The recipient will demonstrate the technology by optimizing the Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling reaction, a widely used synthetic process in medicinal chemistry, establishing a scalable framework for AI-driven reaction optimization. This approach addresses a critical bottleneck in drug development by reducing reaction volumes from 40 milliliters to 0.5 nanoliters, cutting processing time from 60 hours to 4 hours, and scaling throughput from thousands to millions of reactions per day—generating the massive, high-quality datasets required for robust AI prediction models.

The award period runs through July 31, 2027, with place of performance in San Francisco, California.