Robotic Automation in Biotechnology

About the Project

Although the presence of robots has been widely seen across different manufacturing industries, robots are not considered a standard solution in specialized manufacturing facilities that require clean rooms. A significant number of tasks in bioprocessing facilities are still carried out manually. In particular, environmental samples in bioprocessing environments are currently collected manually by highly skilled scientists. The overall process requires a lot of time, is error-prone from a regulatory compliance perspective, and incurs high costs, considering the fact that the total number of Environmental Monitoring (EM) samples collected in a biomanufacturing facility can exceed several thousand annually. Experts have pointed out that the introduction of robotic automation in certain applications with repetitive tasks in bioprocessing facilities has the potential to reduce costs by 35-50%. With the introduction of advanced robotic systems that will be capable of automatically collecting environmental information, bioprocessing companies will be able to utilize their high-end personnel in higher added value tasks and the customers of the bioprocessing firms will be able to enjoy lower prices and end products of higher quality.

A robotic automation solution for bioprocessing facilities is being developed in this project. Project MARVIN is coordinated by University College Dublin in cooperation with a number of leading research partners including PM Group, Lonza, Novartis and NIBRT. The research project is funded by Enterprise Ireland.

Tasks being automated in this project are:

• Environmental sampling using settle plates
• Sampling using contact plates
• Active air sampling
• Non-viable monitoring

Newsletter – September 2020

Contact Project Coordinator

Address: Laboratory for Advanced Manufacturing Simulation and Robotics, University College Dublin, Ireland

Email: nikolaos.papakostas@ucd.ie