About

Innovative Chemistry Group

The Innovative Chemistry group will be established on the basis of the ERA Chairs grant awarded within the Horizon Europe ERA Chairs Call. During the course of the next five years, CATRIN of Palacký University Olomouc will be implementing an absolutely unique project entitled ACCELERATOR, the aim of which is to bring together the world-renowned professor, inventor and innovator, Alexander Dömling, as the ERA Chair, and CATRIN’s all three divisions, merging them into a unique scientific ecosystem.

The Innovative Chemistry group focuses on developing a fast, efficient and partially automated synthesis technology platform suited to optimize compound properties in an (semi)automated, miniaturized and accelerated fashion with the help of inhouse developed generative artificial intelligence algorithms. The technology platform with the name of AMADEUS will be applied to research and development questions in medicinal chemistry, plant enhancement biology and nano material discovery—the three CATRIN’s divisions  (IMTM, CRH, RCPTM, respectively). The fundamental challenge of this research arises from the equation automation + miniaturization = acceleration, which is successfully applied in many technologies and research area. However, synthetic chemistry is largely believed not to be automatable. Miniaturization together with automation will increase the throughput and gain of ‘big data’ to reduce costs, energy and waste. Hence, automation and miniaturization considerably contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals of United Nations and goals set up in the European Green Deal and will dramatically decrease the environmental footprint of future chemistry.

Alexander Dömling (*1964)

Alexander Dömling is a world-renowned scientist in the fields of miniaturization, synthetic chemistry automation and multicomponent reaction chemistry. In the first decade of his professional life, which he refers to as his ” learning period”, he studied chemistry and biology at the Technical University of Munich. He received his doctorate from the world-renowned scientist Ivar Ugi. Thanks to the support of the Humboldt Foundation, he spent his postdoctoral period with two-time Nobel laureate Barry Sharpless at the Scripps Research Institute in California. After returning from the US, he founded his first biotechnology company, Morphochem.

He went on to work at the University of Pittsburgh, where he won several large grants and gained experience in computational and structural biology, which he used, for example, in drug design. He subsequently worked as Head of the Department of Drug Design at the University of Groningen. In more than ten years there he built up the department from scratch with about 30 students and collaborators.

Professor Dömling also has extensive experience in the commercialisation of research results. He has obtained more than 60 patents and co-founded six biotechnology companies.