[kayhi]

In my experience, cost is not related to materials and labor. For example, CROs know if they're likely the only company that can make a product and will charge accordingly. Often and to me sadly, a bidding processes is needed to determine market value of production. I've seen CROs instantly cut pricing in half if you present another option.

I would be cautious with chemical database (unsure which you are using) as there are companies that post chemicals as lead generation and cannot make them.

If you solve the selection of the best route, helping with sourcing the product may not be worth your resources. In other words, just that piece alone, if done well, is very valuable and hope the market sees it.

[morraa]

Yes I guess I was referring to more robust, standard chemistry for which we would expect the pricing to be a little more formulaic.

And you make a great point. We've been constantly reminded that virtual spaces created by CROs are not always executable. As such we can actually constrain our algorithms to require very high probability of reaction success to remove false positives. We then tell the CRO what building blocks they need and the route design. We're still figuring how much of the lifecycle of making molecules is worth going after or, if indeed as you say, the route itself is the key solution.