Multiply Labs said it has developed a new robotic biomanufacturing cluster that it says achieves a 74% cost reduction for cell therapies. Using collaborative robot arms from Universal Robots (UR), the automated manufacturing processes could significantly expand patient access to therapies currently priced between $300,000 and $2 million per dose.
“Historically, cell and gene therapy manufacturing has been manual, almost artisanal," said Fred Parietti, CEO of Multiply Labs. "Expert scientists perform hundreds of tasks by hand, from pipetting to shaking cells." Unlike mass-produced drugs, personalized cell therapies, often used to treat blood cancers like lymphoma and leukemia, require a customized dose from each patient's own cells, making large-batch production impossible. A single microbial contamination renders the entire product unusable, leading to costly manufacturing failures.
Multiply Labs' modular ‘robotic biomanufacturing cluster’ features multiple UR robot arms working in parallel, stacked floor-to-ceiling with collision avoidance, handling the entire cell therapy manufacturing process. This system replicates manual processes with enhanced efficiency, repeatability, and sanitary conditions.
Beyond cost savings, the robotic system also improves space utilization, says Parietti, citing up to 100 times more patient doses per square foot of cleanroom compared to a typical manual process.
A core innovation is Multiply Labs' ‘imitation learning’ technology, where robots learn from expert human demonstrations rather than dictating new processes.
“We ask the pharmaceutical companies that we work with to videotape their scientists performing the tasks. We then feed this data to the robots, and the robots learn to effectively replicate what scientists were doing in the lab, just more efficiently, more repeatably, 24/7, and in parallel,” Parietti said.
