Robots in Biomanufacturing: A Road Map for Automation of Biopharmaceutical Operations
As BioPhorum authors stated in 2019, “It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with biomanufacturing that current designs of bioprocess facilities as well as associated manufacturing spaces and support operations require excessive amounts of manual labor and manual interventions that lead to high labor costs and, consequently, total cost to supply” (1). Back then, a realization was starting to take hold in the biopharmaceutical industry that modern robotics showed great potential. However, a cohesive vision of their future in biotechnology was not yet formed. It has taken three years for this vision to develop into the road map described herein.
The Common Milestones
The road map culminates in the possibility of a fully automated cell and gene therapy facility by 2030. These milestones apply to most biomanufacturing facilities and will need to be tacked on the road towards full automation.
If we consider automation to be the doorway to lights-out facilities of the future, then consumables (e.g., vials, flasks, and so on) and their packaging will be the keys to unlocking that door. Only when we understand those consumables will we have full access to automation. This is why the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (https://ispe-dach.org) and BioPhorum groups are working together on standardization to achieve the desired end result.
Start with the Basics: Beginning with mundane functions will help automation provide precompetitive solutions for the whole biopharmaceutical industry. We expect that the most basic of technical advances in automation will be the first to be realized (Figure 1): material transport, sampling, quality control (QC), and packaging.
Figure 1: The BioPhorum robotics road map, with milestones numbered as detailed in the text.
Figure 2: Keys to generic automation in biopharmaceutical facilities of the future; numbers refer to milestones in Figure 1.
If automation of those common functions is not resolved first, then the goal of total automation never will be attained. Such functions often are overlooked in favor of major upstream and downstream processes. But because they involve little to no competitive information, automation of such mundane operations can be reached through solutions that serve the whole industry rather than bespoke strategies for single pharmaceutical companies.
A Range of Benefits: The value of automation will be great. As described in the 2019 paper, excessive workload often gets cited as the main driver for automation (1). However, there is much more to it than the simple desire for cost avoidance. A number of clear drivers are germane to automation in biopharmaceutical manufacturing (2):
• separation of humans and product streams