Over the last couple of years, pharmaceutical companies have indulged in the production of biologic drugs with the help of a robotic manufacturing platform. The robots can work 24/7 and can accurately formulate small batches of drugs to enable companies to run clinical trials much more efficiently and quickly.
Now researchers are interested in further advancing the speed and precision of these robots with a new type of treatment. They have successfully developed a new robotic platform that can ease bottlenecks in the creation of cell therapies. This is a ground-breaking development for the Laboratory Automation Market as these therapies are known to be a crucial tool against cancer. However, their production is labor-intensive, resulting in high costs. This new technology might help in reducing such costs and help increase production.
The researchers undertook this study with the objective to automate all such processes that currently require the skills of highly trained scientists, thus decreasing the chances of human error. For instance, CAR-T cell therapy necessitates scientists to extract blood from a patient, isolate immune cells from the blood, practice genetic engineering on those cells, grow new cells from it, and then inject them back into the patient. In most cases, each of these steps needs to be repeated with each patient making it a highly skilled and taxing task. The platform might help the scientists with these tasks.
The new platform made by Multiple Labs could also potentially perform other time-consuming tasks involved with cell therapy production. For example, the company’s system will consist of numerous bioreactors used to grow the genetically engineered cell that is to be injected back into the patients. Today, most labs use only one bioreactor for each cleanroom as they need to meet the specific environmental conditions that optimize cell growth. However, the researchers have brought forward the idea of running multiple reactors simultaneously within the space of a basketball court with the belief that it could multiply the throughput cell therapy production.
This new platform has come up at a very crucial time when demand for cell therapy treatment is expected to explode shortly. At present, more than 1,000 clinical trials are underway investigating the potential of a wide range of diseases. But, unfortunately, in few areas, cell therapies have been approved to benefit cancer patients while any other treatments in its place have miserably failed.
Cell therapy treatments could assist many people; however, only a few of them can be administered by centers present today. Looking at the potential, this study would help at the significant setback revolving around the treatment, that is, large-scale manufacturing.