create substance smart material in python

W've got an artists who saved all his work ( a month's work) in a painter version higher that the one used in our pipeline, so his files cannot be opened by other users. AFAIK there's no way to open a 8.2 file in 7.4.2 so I was thinking of automating the creation of smart materials for all his textures sets, and importing them back in 7.4.2. The problem is that I can't seem to find any option/function in the API to create smart materials from texturesets.

has anyone any idea on how to tacke this? Thank you!