ABB Clean Room Robots and Robot-Made Cell Therapies

Multiply Labs just raised $75M to make cell therapies with robots. Here is how ABB clean room robots, GoFa and YuMi fit this kind of sterile lab work.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

9/24/20261 min read

In 1944 the Royal Navy Medical School at Clevedon produced penicillin from racks of glass bottles, and staff in white coats checked and moved them by hand. Making a new drug took skilled people doing careful, repetitive work in rooms kept as clean as they could manage.

Two lab workers in white coats handling racks of glass bottles in a 1940s production room

Penicillin production at the Royal Navy Medical School, Clevedon, 1944. Photo: Royal Navy official photographer / Imperial War Museums via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Most medicines later moved to big automated plants, but cell and gene therapies went the other way. Many are made for one patient at a time from that patient's own cells, in sterile hoods where trained staff pipette, spin and transfer samples by hand over days or weeks.

Researcher in purple gloves working with samples inside a sterile laminar flow cabinet

Handling cell cultures inside a laminar flow cabinet. Photo: Sunmosk / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

On September 17, Multiply Labs said it had raised $75 million in Series B funding, with AstraZeneca Ventures and Legend Biotech among the backers. The San Francisco company builds robotic clusters that run existing lab instruments, and it says they cut cost per dose by 74 percent and raise throughput up to 100 times.

Steel laminar flow cabinet with flasks and pipette boxes on its work surface

A laminar flow cabinet set up for tissue culture. Photo: Miles Smith / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Multiply Labs uses arms from another maker, but ABB robots already do this kind of sterile handling elsewhere. ABB sells Clean Room versions of the IRB 1100, IRB 1200 and IRB 1300, sealed and smooth so they shed very few particles, and chip makers use them to handle wafer boxes.

White ABB robot labelled Clean Room handling trays in an enclosed cell

An ABB IRB 1300 Clean Room robot. Photo: ABB

In the lab, ABB has connected its GoFa cobot to instruments from METTLER TOLEDO and Agilent and run whole bench workflows at the SLAS lab automation conference. The dual-arm YuMi was designed for small, delicate parts, which is close to what vials, tubes and pipette tips demand.

Close-up of a white ABB GoFa arm gripping a lab plate beside instruments

An ABB GoFa cobot working with lab instruments at the SLAS lab automation conference. Photo: ABB

If robot cells can make a personal therapy as reliably as a factory makes tablets, more hospitals could offer these treatments and patients would wait less for a manufacturing slot. I also hope the price comes down, because right now these therapies are among the most expensive medicines there are.

Dual-arm ABB YuMi robot handling small parts on a bench next to a scientist

ABB's dual-arm YuMi (IRB 14000) handling small parts. Photo: ABB

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