Casandra – Chemical Hazard Alerting For The 21st Century

At BioIT World, Roger presented a poster on NextMove Software’s Casandra. Casandra is a server for alerting of chemical and reactive hazards.

“Patents you wouldn’t want to work with”

Readers of Derek Lowe’s In The Pipeline may be familiar with a series of posts titled “Things I won’t work with”. In the spirit of those posts, we recently ran Casandra on one million reactions extracted from US Patents. One patent highlighted in this preliminary analysis contained an extremely energetic compound.

It turns out the above patent is actually from a defence agency and they were intending to make explosives. A more subtle reactive hazard was found in US20020173655A1.

Here the amide (DMF) and metal hydride (NaH) can react exothermically in a self-accelerating reaction[1,2].

The Casandra poster is available here. If this is an area of interest to you feel free to get in touch with us.

[1] J. Buckley et al., Chemical & Engineering News, Jul. 12, 1982, page 5
[2] G. DeWail, Chemical & Engineering News, Sep. 13, 1982