Performance of a Modular Robotic Cluster Matches Skilled Human Operators for Complex Cell Therapy Manufacturing Tasks
Authored by Sudeshna Sadhu, Brigitte Schmittlein, Angela Lares, Christopher Cheng, Xiaojie Chen, Varun Bhatia, Winston Zha, Sebastien Wha, Sunaina Nayak, Marco Uboldi, Yifan Yu, Jiawei Wang, Wei Zhang, Prajakta P. Bhanap, Yongchang Ji, Andrew Scheffler, John Wilson, Dan Welch, Nikolaos Gkitsas-Long, Aidan Jeffrey Retherford, Ramya Tunuguntla, Alice Melocchi, Alexandre Girard, Federico Parietti, Steven A. Feldman, and Jonathan H. Esensten
- Posted
- Server
- bioRxiv
Abstract
Although numerous cell and gene therapies have received regulatory approval, their adoption has been hampered by high cost and challenges in scaling out manufacturing. Many autologous cell therapies are individually manufactured for each patient using traditional manual methods in high-cost environments. Therefore, robotics and automation offer a potential solution to meet the growing demand for such therapies. To ensure identical biological outcomes, automation must replicate validated manual workflows, a requirement that poses significant engineering challenges, especially for aseptic manipulation and compatibility with manual-centric instruments and consumables. Here we describe the design and performance of a modular robotic cluster consisting of specialized modules containing widely adopted equipment. The robotic arm uses custom end-effectors to handle standard consumables and instruments such as syringes, vials, bags, cell counters, bioreactors, incubators, and closed centrifuges. We compared the performance of skilled human operators against the robotic cluster across multiple tasks: transferring cells between sterile bags, cell counting, drawing volume from a vial to a syringe, and resuspension and sampling from both a bag and G-Rex 100M-CS bioreactor. The robotic system also executed high-complexity operations with industry-standard instruments: cell selection using a CytoSinct 1000 and wash/buffer exchange with a CTS Rotea Counterflow centrifugation system. Experimental results for each unit operation show that the robotic cluster’s performance is equivalent to manual operations on the selected key metrics. These data demonstrate that the robotic system can efficiently and robustly perform specific unit operations, which can be combined in any order for end-to-end cell therapy manufacturing processes.
One Sentence summary
A modular robotic system can perform key unit operations in cell therapy manufacturing with accuracy comparable to human operators while ensuring throughput and flexibility.
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