Chemist Insight Is First-Class Data
Medicinal chemistry runs on judgement.
Not the vague kind. The sharp, hard-earned kind that shows up as a throwaway comment in a design meeting:
- “That substitution will spike clearance.”
- “This looks like a P-gp magnet.”
- “We’re about to grow a rotatable bond tax.”
- “This series is going to fall apart on solubility.”
Most software discards that signal.
Blaise treats it as first-class data.
The key idea: feedback is an asset, not an annotation
In a real program, the scarce resource isn’t compute. It’s experienced attention.
Chemists see nuance instantly because they’ve internalised:
- series-specific structure–property trade-offs
- project history and priors
- the unspoken constraints (synthesis, IP, tox, developability)
If your system can’t capture that, it will keep repeating the same mistakes with better typography.
What “first-class” means in practice
In Blaise, comments and critique are not sticky notes.
They are structured signals that plug back into the design loop:
- the critique is linked to the exact molecules/series it refers to
- the system learns what a given team calls “good” or “bad” in context
- the scoring and proposal logic adapts immediately
That closes a loop most “AI for chemistry” products leave open.
Why this beats static scoring functions
Static property predictors are brittle:
- they miss project-specific constraints
- they over-generalise across chemical space
- they ignore the implicit multi-objective nature of optimisation
Chemist feedback is the missing term in the objective.
Capture it, and the system stops being a demo and starts becoming a colleague.
The compounding effect
The first time you capture critique, you get a better next suggestion.
The hundredth time, you’ve built something more important:
- a project memory of what your team learned
- an auditable design trail
- a reusable set of “house rules” grounded in actual outcomes
That’s how you make AI useful in drug discovery: not by pretending models are omniscient, but by wiring expert judgement into the loop.