An out-of-hours cell culture autopilot proof of concept based on a modular architecture using the SiLA2 open standard

Abstract

There has been much talk and substantial progress in automated and flexible smart lab concepts in biopharma R&D. This is acknowledged to be important in enabling the acceleration of innovation and digitization of R&D operations. However, many proposals stop short of full end-to-end automation – limiting out-of-hours operation, which is particularly important in tasks such as cell culture - or are locked to a particular vendor's offering in a dedicated system - which can limit the flexibility and shared use access so important in R&D.

In this contribution we describe a proof-of-concept of a fully integrated automated adherent cell culture system based on a modular architecture that allows integration of the most recent developments on the market (cell imaging, collaborative cloud robotics, mobile robots) as well as reuse of existing legacy devices (incubators and refrigerators). This creates a “cell culture autopilot” for small-scale cell culture, with repetitive media exchange, confluency checking, and splitting steps which are typically labor-intensive and must take place at times outside the working day.

The system is built around the open lab communication standard SiLA2 and various other open-source resources to create three ways in which the SiLA2 standard can be leveraged. This choice of connectivity options provides freedom to integrate the most appropriate device while minimizing undesired vendor-lock in This paper provides sufficient details for the reader to access the resources to build on such a system for cell culture and other applications. We believe this to be the first report of a true vendor-agnostic system operating in a commercial environment.

This paper corresponds to the special issue on Robotics in Laboratory Automation as it describes robotics for labware transportation within a shared environment, and an automation framework supporting physical and logical interoperability.