StemCell Therapy

Bioscience research is undergoing a wave of automation and digitization, turning a manual, laborious practice into a true industry.

Why it matters: Biotechnology promises to revolutionize everything from medicine to energy, but for that to happen, the field needs to move out of the traditional lab and into something resembling a foundry. The growth of robotics and cloud-based remote research can help make that happen.

What's happening: In a report published last week, the design and engineering firm Arup made the case that the future of scientific labs will increasingly be automated and digitized, allowing researchers to carry out experiments remotely and scale up their work faster.

How it works: That means labs where experiments can be automated think robot arms moving vials en masse, rather than overworked graduate students pipetting by hand.

Of note: Benchling, which helps life science researchers remotely track and share data, has seen a 35% increase in platform use from customers working on COVID-19.

Zoom in: Speed and industrialization in the lab are particularly vital for developing a COVID-19 vaccine in record time.

Context: Ginkgo Bioworks, which is now valued at more than $4 billion, represents the cutting edge of biotech industrialization.

What's next: On Tuesday, the Department of Defense announced it would award $87.5 million which will be matched by more than $180 million in non-federal funding to establish a manufacturing innovation institute called BioMADE at the University of Minnesota.

The bottom line: If the 21st century really is going to be the "age of biology," as some experts have predicted, the field needs to undergo its own version of the Industrial Revolution.

See the article here:
Biology is having its industrial revolution - Axios

This entry was posted on October 25, 2020 at 5:56 am and is filed under Biotechnology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |