A robot on a gantry runs the length of the workcell, transferring plates from machine to machine to carry out the experiments. The workcells are operated by computers, which receive experiment work orders and run the assemblage of machines. Here, the company builds and manages Plexiglas-enclosed robotic biology labs, or “workcells.” They’re containers about the same width and length as a parking space and that house about 20 devices each, including pipetting systems. Founded in 2012, and backed by Google Ventures and the founders behind Pay Pal, the company now numbers 40 people and occupies a 22,000 square-foot facility in the heart of Silicon Valley. The self-proclaimed first robotic cloud lab for on-demand life science research was developed by a start-up company called Transcriptic. But as sophisticated AI and robotics begin to change how biology is done, these companies are facing competition from, of course, Silicon Valley tech firms.
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One of them, the London DNA Foundry, at Imperial College London, for instance, can build and test about 15,000 different genetic designs in a day.īut even with various machines, like pipetting robots, to support the work, contract research organizations are still providing, essentially, a labor-intensive manual service. And rather than buying their own lab hardware, an increasing number of companies are now outsourcing the work to so-called contract research organizations-third-party firms that are centralising and scaling the wet work of genetic engineering. Some companies, instead, invest in expensive robotic machines to support their work. But for large volumes of research work, the kinds pharma and biotech companies do, hand-pipetting is just not an option. So much so, in fact, that 90 percent of the 4 million biologists around the world still do their pipetting by hand. And they no longer have to worry about manual mistakes or inaccurate measurements either. Robotic machines have been developed to do many of these tasks, giving scientists more time to actually do science. Pipetting, running gels, transfecting cells, growing bacteria, amplifying DNA, sequencing-it all takes time. Biological wet work, as it is called, is time-consuming, too. While genetic engineering may sound exciting, the actual lab work involved to manipulate an organism’s genes is repetitive, painstaking, and tedious.
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The question the group members were grappling with, rather, was how to deal with the modern, robotic equivalent to the old fashioned pipette-the new group of experimental biology platforms known as cloud labs. The plastic pipettes are not on these lists, and neither will they be.
Collectively known as the Australia Group, the delegates from 43 mainly Western countries were meeting to discuss updates to their lists of restricted exports of materials and equipment that could potentially be misused to develop chemical and biological weapons. At a classified meeting in Paris earlier this month, dozens of international delegates were handed plastic pipettes and asked to imagine doing one of the most basic tasks in genetic engineering: moving small, but exact volumes of liquid around.
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