Use of robots in the pharmaceutical industry: potential benefits and current developments

If you believe the job adverts, employers in the pharmaceutical industry have a clear picture of the ideal production employee: they should be competent, reliable, safety-conscious and responsible, adaptable and adaptive, solution-oriented, precise, efficient and physically resilient. The requirement profile is complex - and in times of increasingly complex processes and a simultaneous shortage of skilled labour, the call for simplification and relief is getting louder and louder. This can be achieved through the division of labour - not only between people, but also between people and machines. This is where robotics comes into its own. Because the colleague made of steel and electronics has more and more of the characteristics of an ideal employee described above. And with each new generation, more and more of the disadvantages of previous robots disappear: high investments, complex programming, cleanroom suitability.

From Adam and Eve to the synthesis robot

It starts in the laboratory, where robots have long been taking over repetitive and tedious tasks and helping to massively speed up the development process. And it starts with Adam and Eve, among others. We are talking about laboratory robots, which Cambridge professor Ross King has been developing and upgrading into robotic scientists for almost two decades. ‘Eve’ automates the entire drug development process and now integrates three normally separate early drug development processes: screening, hit confirmation and QSAR (quantitative structure-activity relationship). This integration allows Eve to test thousands of compounds against a given assay and predict the efficacy of new compounds. The next step for Eve is the ability to synthesise its own compounds for screening purposes.

Biochemist Prof Peter Seeberger is also pursuing this approach: Seeberger wants to use automated synthesis machines to completely rethink chemical and pharmaceutical production. To this end, the Director of Biomolecular Systems at the MPI Potsdam is establishing the large-scale research centre ‘Center for the Transformation of Chemistry’ in eastern Germany. ‘Automated systems can help us to research completely new groups of substances and produce them in an environmentally friendly way,’ Seeberger is convinced. And because robots and automated machines can record every step in a traceable manner, the new synthesis machines should also enable the substances to be produced worldwide. According to pharmaceutical experts, robot-based laboratory syntheses are also the key to economically feasible personalised medicine, in which drugs are tailor-made for individual patients.

From laboratory robots to the use of robots in production

Automated laboratory syntheses are already becoming the nucleus of new production processes. For example, Essert Robotics has automated pipetting, mixing and dosing or the assembly of medical products such as pen applicators or syringes with its Advanced Robotic Workstation. The company from Bruchsal in Germany thinks big on a small scale: with the MindFactory concept, Essert has broken down not only laboratory tasks but also production processes into modules that can be combined depending on the product and fully automated with the help of its own robot platform.

The idea is not new - the topic of module automation has been doing the rounds in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries for several years. For example at Merck in Darmstadt, where process automation is standardised and modularised with the help of the Module Type Package (MTP). MTP enables the flexible integration and configuration of modules from different manufacturers in a standardised system. The aim is to massively accelerate the market launch of new products and optimise production processes - with or without robots.

Laboratory and synthesis are one side of the value chain in the pharmaceutical process in which robots are increasingly being used. Robots are also becoming increasingly prevalent in the production process. One milestone, for example, was the design of robots that meet the stringent requirements for devices for use in cleanroom classes A to D. On the one hand, they must not introduce any impermissible quantities of particles into the cleanroom, and on the other, they must be easy to clean - including sterilisation or disinfection with hydrogen peroxide vapour. Companies such as Stäubli, Fanuc and ABB are at the forefront. The machines perform tasks in hazardous environments and when handling toxic substances, for which employees previously had to wear elaborate protective equipment.