Revolutionizing Cell Line Development With Cutting-Edge Automation Solutions

By Peggy Lio, Cytiva, and Miranda Kheradmand, Danaher Life Sciences

Automation can take many different forms in a biopharmaceutical workflow, and is often focused on reducing the hands-on time necessary for processing a given step. To perform a cell line stability study, for example, an organization may enable a point solution such as automated sample processing by integrating a liquid handler with an incubator, eliminating the need to split cultures manually every three or four days. In other cases, organizations may work to pursue “total lab automation,” establishing a workflow where a process is managed by an interconnected system, automating processes ranging from cell culture to analytical sample preparation. While this level of automation still requires hands-on work for certain process steps, it serves to increase reproducibility and consistency, which in turn can increase laboratory capacity.

The diversity of the workflows established by developers and laboratories over the years has led to a proliferation in technologies designed to support cell line development (CLD) campaigns. This variability in both equipment and supporting protocols across drug development can make scaling processes and tech transfer to an external partner a challenge. Yet, advancements made in support of these workflows have created the potential for greater standardization and automation, eliminating the most common workflow bottlenecks and improving the reproducibility of a process.