How Scientific Data Is Powering Safer Chemistry: A Conversation with CAS
Bringing safer, more sustainable chemistry to scale requires more than good intentions—it demands access to the right information. From understanding what's in a formulation to identifying functional alternatives or mapping out chemical supply chains, today’s innovators are navigating a complex data landscape with limited resources and mounting pressure to move quickly.
For many, the first hurdle is understanding exactly what chemicals are present in a product or process—and determining how to make smarter, safer choices. That’s where scientific knowledge management becomes critical.
CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society (ACS), is a long-standing player in this space. Best known for its CAS Registry Numbers® and CAS SciFinder® research solution, CAS also offers a range of capabilities that help scientists, sustainability professionals, and business leaders organize and apply chemical information to real-world challenges. From connecting regulatory data to mapping supply chains and surfacing viable alternatives, CAS supports decision-making across the innovation lifecycle.
As a Platinum Sponsor of this year’s Innovators Roundtable, CAS has joined the Change Chemistry community to help bridge information gaps and accelerate safer chemistry innovation. In the conversation below, two leaders from CAS—Ian MacGregor, Principal of Business Development, and Molly Strausbaugh, Director of Scientific Content Management—share how CAS is evolving to support the shift toward safer chemicals, what barriers they’re seeing in the field, and where they believe the biggest opportunities lie for future innovation.
Change Chemistry: CAS plays a critical role in scientific knowledge management. How is CAS leveraging its vast chemical information resources to support the transition to safer chemicals and sustainable chemistry?
Ian: Many people in the scientific community know us for CAS Registry Numbers or CAS SciFinder—but we’re far more than that. At our core, we’re a scientific content and knowledge management organization, combining curated data, subject matter expertise, and technology to drive discovery.
Our work directly supports the development of safer, more sustainable chemistries. For example, we’ve developed solutions to map chemical supply chains, increasing transparency and helping identify substances of concern throughout the value chain. That’s often the first step toward sustainability: understanding what you're working with.
Molly’s team has gone even further by connecting those supply chain maps to real-world commerce using Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) codes. Since everything traded has an HTS code, this allows us to trace substances of concern back through the supply chain and understand their role in finished products.
We’ve also created an approach to help identify safer alternatives to existing chemicals. So if a company is using a non-preferred ingredient, we can help find a viable substitute. But none of that would be possible without the structured, interconnected content at the foundation of it all. Our system isn’t just a database—it’s a living, curated framework designed by human subject matter experts to support innovation at every level.
Molly: That’s really the key to how we work. Ian mentioned the CAS Registry Number—it’s not scientific on its own, but it uniquely identifies a chemical substance. And from that central hub, we can make all kinds of connections.
We can link a CAS Registry Number to physical and chemical properties, Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals (GHS) data, regulatory information, and more. Those connections power innovation. It’s essential to be able to tie together hazard data, safety profiles, and regulations, especially when we're looking at safer, more sustainable chemistry.
We can also connect CAS Registry Numbers to each other to understand how substances are used in combination or find structurally similar chemicals that could serve as replacements. It all comes down to how we structure the content and the work our scientists do to collect and connect that data—so others can use it to innovate more effectively.
Change Chemistry: How are you gathering all of this data?
Molly: In lots of ways. We have a large team of scientific professionals, and our work originally centered around published literature—reviewing patents and peer-reviewed scientific articles. Even when CAS started over 110 years ago, people were already saying, “There’s too much literature—help me find what I need.” That’s still what our scientists are enabling today, but the results are expanded to data capabilities, not simply literature identification.
They work closely with proprietary technology we've developed to comb through patents and journals, using their expertise to identify what’s important or novel, and then extract those key pieces of information. From there, they start building connections—and over time, those connections increase the power and improve the utility of our database.
We also incorporate information from other public sources, such as regulatory databases, safety data, and property data. With each new connection, we learn more and extend the network further. It's really an ongoing process of building, connecting, and expanding what we know from science.
Change Chemistry: How do organizations typically work with CAS—and how has that relationship evolved as sustainability challenges have become more complex?
Ian: Our team and our customers span the globe and represent a wide range of industries. A big part of our work is with the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors. Many patent offices around the world license our solutions to access our content. That’s typically how much of the scientific community interacts with our data: through the products we offer as software-as-a-service.
We’ve been doing that kind of work for decades, and organizations focused on R&D, innovation, or discovery usually know who we are and how to use our solutions. But more recently, we’ve expanded our offerings to provide even more tailored value through a newer division within CAS—called CAS Custom ServicesSM. That’s where I sit, and Molly plays a key role there as well.
CAS Custom Services was created about seven years ago to help organizations with needs that go beyond what our products can deliver. For example, in the past, if someone said, “I tried to find something in CAS SciFinder but couldn’t,” we’d log that request and maybe add it as a future feature.
But now, if a company says, “I need help finding an alternative to a non-preferred chemical in my formulation,” they don’t have to wait. They can work with us directly, one-on-one, through CAS Custom Services, and we’ll help them find that alternative. It’s a more collaborative, problem-solving approach that complements our core solutions.
Change Chemistry: Can you tell us about the ICCA Plastic Additives Database and your involvement with it?
Ian: When Molly and I attended the Innovators Roundtable in St. Louis in November 2023, we were having lunch with some colleagues from Dow who mentioned they were involved in developing a plastics additives database through the International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA). They thought it could really benefit from the kind of authoritative scientific content CAS provides.
That conversation led to an introduction to the American Chemistry Council, which was taking the lead on building the database on ICCA’s behalf. It quickly became clear that having accurate, well-structured content was essential for the database to be effective.
One of our main contributions was supplying CAS Registry Numbers. Chemical substances can have dozens of different names, making it hard to search for or reference them consistently. The CAS Registry Number simplifies that by creating a single point of reference.
So we provided those identifiers, as well as chemical names, regulatory data, and other metadata that helped populate the database. That way, when users—whether from NGOs, academic institutions, or government agencies—access the database, they can be confident they’re looking at the right substance and have the regulatory context they need.
It was a great example of the value of the Change Chemistry community—connecting people and organizations with shared goals. And for us, it was a rewarding partnership with the American Chemistry Council to bring that database to life.
Change Chemistry: Bringing sustainable chemistry solutions to scale is often cited as a key challenge. What do you see as the biggest barriers to commercialization, and how can CAS help address them?
Molly: One of the biggest barriers I see is the tendency to look for the “perfect” solution right away—something that solves everything all at once. But sometimes, that mindset overlooks the importance of incremental improvement. It’s often more effective to start small: identify a quick win, pilot it, test it, and learn how to scale from there.
It is essential to balance short-term wins and long-term strategies. Long-term goals are important, of course, but progress often happens in stages. We always try to support both approaches, helping organizations take that first step while also working toward those bigger-picture solutions.
Another challenge is maintaining functionality. A sustainable solution still has to work—it has to perform well and be something people actually want to use. It needs to be functional for the user and beneficial for the planet. That’s where the “people, planet, profit” balance really comes in. All three have to be in play.
Ian: That “profit” piece is critical. You won’t see adoption beyond early adopters—or beyond companies that are already deeply committed to sustainability—unless there’s a cost justification. That’s just the reality. To me, the cost factor is the biggest barrier to scaling.
I think about how electric vehicle adoption didn’t take off until the costs started coming down. The same thing applies here. At CAS, we can help by providing the connected scientific information people need to identify alternatives or solutions. We help enable those innovation journeys—especially for companies looking for quick wins that can keep them in business while working toward longer-term goals.
Let’s say your long-term strategy is to replace every non-preferred solvent in your operations. That’s great—but you’ve got to start somewhere. If you can identify just one sustainable, scalable alternative that performs well and is cost-competitive with the current option, that’s real progress. And once you have that, you can move on to the next one.
Change Chemistry: Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation in sustainable chemistry over the next 10 to 20 years—particularly in your work?
Molly: I think automation is going to be a major driver of innovation. And I don’t just mean in the discovery phase—though there’s a lot of power in using analytics to speed up research. When you start integrating more data and bring in artificial intelligence, you can unlock insights more quickly. But to me, the most exciting opportunities come when you pair AI with human expertise. There’s always a person at the helm. It’s that partnership between human judgment and machine efficiency that really brings the best outcomes.
This kind of automation can reduce R&D timelines by helping scientists focus their time and energy where it matters most. Some aspects of testing and analysis can be automated, which opens up new bandwidth for innovation.
On the production side, we also have to think about how materials move through global supply chains. If you look at what’s crossing oceans, moving across countries—how it’s being transported—there’s a huge sustainability impact in those logistics. But automation and localized, modular manufacturing can help reduce that footprint. You might have smaller, more efficient plants operating side-by-side, using reusable equipment or repurposed infrastructure. That kind of distributed model, powered by automated synthesis, could shrink environmental impact naturally while increasing production agility.
Ian: At CAS, our role increasingly involves something we call “AI enablement.” As artificial intelligence and machine learning become more embedded in chemistry and manufacturing, high-quality, structured information is absolutely essential. These models need well-organized data to train on—not just lists from journal articles, but harmonized, contextualized content.
Molly has been speaking with organizations around the world about this exact need—the importance of having scientific content that’s already structured in a way that AI can use effectively. The models may get most of the spotlight, but the training data is just as critical. And that’s where CAS has a lot to offer. Because of the work we’ve done to curate and connect information, our content is what I’d call “near AI-ready.”
We’ve been having more and more conversations with groups asking to use our data to train models—whether that’s for on-demand manufacturing, discovery of new materials, automation, or other innovations. That’s where I see CAS continuing to serve the sustainable chemistry community: as a trusted provider of the foundational information needed to power these next-generation solutions.
Change Chemistry: What drew CAS to get more deeply involved with Change Chemistry and the Innovators Roundtable—and why does this collaboration matter to you personally?
Ian: Before I joined CAS, I worked in environmental science research. So I’ve always gravitated toward projects that focus on using science for good—and that’s really at the heart of what Change Chemistry is all about. There’s a strong alignment between the mission of Change Chemistry and that of the American Chemical Society and CAS. As a division of the ACS, CAS exists to improve people’s lives through the power of chemistry. That’s very much in line with what Change Chemistry is working to do.
On a personal level, I’m passionate about this space. I know Molly is too, and we’ve both been strong advocates for CAS to become more involved. The Innovators Roundtable creates a meaningful space for collaboration, and we want to be part of that.
Molly: Absolutely. Like Ian, I truly believe in the power of chemistry to transform lives—and that comes with a responsibility for chemists to lead with intention. For me, being involved in this community is about continuous learning, sharing what we’ve learned, developing best practices, and being deeply committed to solving real problems.
It’s not enough for something to work—it also has to be safe and sustainable. What was so impactful about previous Innovators Roundtables was meeting so many like-minded professionals who are serious about change. It’s a space for honest dialogue: talking about challenges, finding opportunities for improvement, and asking, “What step can we take forward today?” That’s incredibly motivating.