Over the past two decades, a new trend has emerged in medical science ” personalized medicine, which employs genetic testing and diagnostic tools to help doctors create medication regimens and treatment plans tailor-fit to a patient’s biology.
The approach, while often much more effective than a trial-and-error approach to care planning, can be difficult to implement. Doctors often struggle to coordinate expensive, time-consuming testing with patient care.
In many cases, a patient may need medicine right away ” and, as a result, may not have time for labs to return vital information on the patient’s individual health needs.
Robotics in the life sciences are playing an increasingly central role in making personalized medicine much more practical. Soon, they could transform personalized medicine ” and potentially reshape how doctors treat some diseases.
How Robotics Improves Personalized Medicine
Robotics and automation technology play two major roles in personalized medicine. First, they help streamline laboratory operations ” making it much more practical to order in-depth testing, like a whole genome sequence or other genetic test. Second, they make manufacturing individualized therapies and medications much easier.
Major strides have been made in the space of just a few years. In the 2000s, for example, researchers had begun to take seriously the idea of the $1,000 genome ” or, the ability to sequence a person’s entire genome for less than $1,000.
By 2015, labs had begun to come near the target ” so long as you discounted overhead costs. Since then,advances in lab automation have blown past the $1,000 target. Some private labs offer full genome sequencing for as little as $299, and the industry is currently striving for a $100 genome.
Advances in robotics played a major role in driving these costs down, and future advances ” like robotic liquid handling ” may bring genome sequencing prices even lower.
Robotics in Decentralized Medical Manufacturing
Robotics is also essential for the manufacture of individualized medicines. A batch manufacturing approach won’t work for these therapies, as the medicine’s composition may be nearly unique to the particular individual taking it.
Autologous cell therapies, for example, require the production of one batch per patient ” a process that isn’t workable with standard batch production.
Robotics also enable certain decentralized (or distributed) approaches to manufacturing, like self-contained machine cells that can manufacture medicines at the scale of one batch per patient.
These production methods use the same pharmaceutical ingredients as standard production processes.
One, for example, may start with transferring purified water, which is a necessary component of IV fluids, vaccines, other injectables and even things like COVID-19 test kits or PPE.
This ingredient along with all other necessary ingredients, media or agents, will be sourced locally and shipped to the laboratory, where technicians will use it to stock individual manufacturing pods. These pods will use a combination of these ingredients and robotics to manufacture patient-specific therapies.
These decentralized manufacturing processes offer other benefits, as well. In many cases, they encourage businesses to source resources and hire locally, helping to democratize the production of medicine.
Manufacturing individualized medicines as needed, rather than batch processing to meet estimated demands, may also help companies create more sustainable manufacturing processes. At a time when green healthcare and green medical manufacturing is becoming a common topic of discussion, these more sustainable approaches could be a valuable asset.
The Future of Robotics in Personalized Medicine
Despite these major advances in a short time frame, personalized medicine remains expensive and unwieldy.
While it’s much more practical now to order a genetic test and use that information to develop personalized therapies, prices for testing remain high and solutions for single-batch manufacturing are still typically experimental.
However, demand for personalized medicine is high, and the potential of the field means that need for robotics in the industry will likely increase. Current market research forecasts that the industry will grow to reach a value of $96.97 billion at a CAGR of more than 10% by 2025.
As the industry expands, the need for more and more innovative automated solutions will likely grow as well.
