Reaction screening
The problem
Reaction screening is no small task – optimizing yield, purity, and efficiency while driving reactions towards greener, milder conditions. Whether you’re developing Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), scaling up processes, screening catalysts, or mapping reactivity across libraries, you’ve got to find the best conditions fast and back them up with real, reproducible data.
Running hundreds of reactions manually burns time, reagents, and focus. Even with high-throughput tools, setup can be tedious, error-prone, and disconnected from data analysis. Basic automation helps you run more experiments, but not necessarily design better ones or understand your data any faster.
The right tool for the job
Stuntman combines built-in AI with modular hardware to adapt to what your chemistry process needs and efficiently screen reactions. Turn your natural-language prompts into executable scripts that can orchestrate closed-loop automation from start to finish. Stuntman’s AI helps plan and organize experiments, interpret results, and guide how things progress. Design, execute, and analyze experiments all in one place using Stuntman AI, intuitive drag-and-drop interface workflows, or Python with full API access. Every reaction is tracked in real time and every datapoint is captured as it happens.
Configure your deck your way to automate experimental setup, explore massive condition spaces — discrete or continuous, catalysts or reagents, solvents or temperatures. Stuntman brings every part of small-molecule discovery together — setup, execution, and analysis on a single deck – from weighing and transferring reagents to controlling temperature, mixing, and reaction time.
What’s possible
Powder dispense
Every reaction screen needs solids, and reagents dispensed precisely. Two hopper formats on Stuntman – Classic and Storage Vial (SV) – cover everything from sub-milligram catalyst charges to gram-scale reagent additions. They handle everything from free-flowing powders to stubborn, chunky solids without breaking a sweat. Load any combo of hoppers on deck and let Stuntman’s adaptive algorithms learn each powder’s flow profile for precise, reproducible delivery.
Classic hoppers (10, 25, 50, 100 mL) nail one-to-many dispenses when the same powder goes into multiple wells. SV hoppers are ideal for massive screens with dozens of unique reagents or materials, using standard 4 mL glass vials with disposable heads. Stack dozens on deck, keep hundreds more off deck, and track every dispense with full traceability. Compact, flexible, and reusable hoppers make for the perfect setup for high-throughput chemistry.
Liquid and reagent dispense
Stuntman has numerous options for transferring liquids. Positive Displacement Tips (PDTs) handle everything from volatile solvents to viscous reagents and slurries, spanning 10 µL to 10 mL. Wide-bore needles keep slurries and suspensions flowing without clogs. Solvents can be drawn from on-deck or off-deck sources, ranging from a few microliters to hundreds of milliliters. Every liquid type is individually calibrated, so every dispense hits the target — no drips, no waste, no surprises.
Heated liquid dispense
Organic solvents can be tricky — volatile, fast-evaporating, and solutions that crystallize or clog when they cool. Stuntman’s heated liquid-dispense tools keep reagents soluble and transfers spotless so every reaction starts right.
The heated, spreadable six-tip head runs up to 120 °C, keeping reagents soluble through temperature-sensitive workflows. Adjustable spacing from 9–20 mm fits everything from 96-well plates to larger vials, so you can move easily between discovery and development formats. The 6-tip includes an extendable tip if you just need one solution at a time, and the head can be put into 4-tip mode if that’s what’s needed for your plate format.
For sealed-vial workflows, Stuntman’s piercing needles on the heated 6-tip work seamlessly with automated capping and septum access. Volatile or air-sensitive reagents stay contained and stable from setup to sampling.
Capping and crimping
Uniform sealing is critical for consistent results. Whether you’re running sealed-vessel chemistry, microwave-assisted reactions, or small-volume screens with volatile reagents, a perfect seal is what keeps data clean and samples intact.
Stuntman automates screw capping, decapping, and crimp sealing, eliminating variability from one of the most tedious manual steps. Vials are tightened or crimped with precise torque and alignment for airtight, reproducible seals across the deck. Every reaction starts and stays on equal footing – maintaining solvent balance, preventing evaporation and making volatile, air-sensitive, and microwave reactions easy to run.
Mixing and thermal control
Uniform, reproducible mixing is critical for reliable reaction screening. Heat, cool, stir, or shake – dial in exactly what your chemistry needs. Run 96-well plates or larger vial formats, with each plate running its own temperature program.
Magnetic stirring on the Heat/Cool/Stir Bay keeps reactions uniform across plates and vials, while orbital shaking on the Vortex ensures even mixing for systems that need lower shear. Temperature spans from ambient to 180 °C, with optional active cooling below 0 °C for exothermic or temperature-sensitive reactions. Stirring speeds, durations, and temperature profiles are fully programmable, so you can fine-tune mixing intensity and thermal conditions to suit your chemistry needs.
Filtration and sample cleanup
When reactions finish, Stuntman automates cleanup right on deck. Integrated filtration separates solids from liquids, removing catalysts, salts, or particulates before analysis. Stuntman works seamlessly with filter vials, filtration plates, and vacuum manifolds, adapting to any workflow or chemistry. Reaction mixtures come out clean, clarified, and ready for LC, GC, or spectroscopy without ever leaving the deck.
Small scale pressurized reactions
If your chemistry demands tighter control — volatile solvents, gas–liquid systems, or exothermic transformations — the Deck Screening Pressure Reactor (DSPR) is your go-to. The Deck Screening Pressure Reactor (DSPR) can be used with Heat/Cool/Stir Bay on Stuntman.
The DSPR operates to 180 °C and 200 psi (13.8 bar) with up to 96 reactions in a single run. Beyond pressure, the DSPR ensures uniform heat and mixing across every reactor, eliminating concentration drift, solvent loss, and variability. For reaction screening, that means you can safely test everything from mild ambient reactions to challenging, pressurized ones — all in the same automated workflow.
When you’re ready to probe kinetics or mechanism, move seamlessly into the Optimization Sampling Reactor (OSR) for simplified reaction prep and reaction condition processing.
Integrations
With Stuntman, the integrations and add-ons are endless. Use Stuntman’s built-in AI or Python API to connect with your own tools and data systems, or AI and machine learning platforms. Drop in modules for filtration, dilution, evaporation, reaction work-ups or hook it up to third party systems for prep, processing or analysis. Keep expanding as your science evolves.
Stuntman
Stuntman has natural-language AI embedded directly into the system to help plan and design smarter experiments, close the loop faster, and adapt as conditions change, while hardware is configured upfront to fit your workflow. The result is faster iteration, more informative data, and automation that finally keeps pace with real science, whether you’re working in chemistry, biologics, materials, or beyond.
Want more info?
Every lab has different bottlenecks and challenges. We’re all about partnering with you to build the bespoke solution that lets you do science faster and better. Have questions or can’t wait to speak with our expert team to find out what might be possible?