Performance of a modular robotic cluster matches skilled human operators for complex cell therapy manufacturing tasks

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 100 M-CS bioreactor. The robotic system also executed high-complexity operations with industry-standard instruments: cell isolation 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 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 may provide a foundation for future integrated end-to-end cell therapy manufacturing processes.