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The robots have entered the pharmaceutical laboratories and they are here to stay. At Uppsala's Biomedical Center, Ola Spjuth's research group inaugurated as early as 2021 an infrastructure that normally requires financial resources far beyond the framework of academia. By using off-the-shelf components and open-source methodologies, the team succeeded in creating a cost-effective infrastructure in which group members carry out both maintenance and development.

“Our group explores potential side effects of pharmaceutical substances on cells. We do this in large-scale experiments, using microscopy to generate vast numbers of images as cells are exposed to different drugs. We then analyze the material using Artificial Intelligence, with the results providing valuable indications of which candidates to proceed with,” says Ola Spjuth, Professor of Pharmaceutical Bioinformatics.

The prospect of employees who never get sick or demand to work from home is attractive to the international industry, which is currently investing huge resources in automating its processes. The road ahead is wide open with one notable exception: the lack of competence required to operate the technology. Needless to say, attention was overwhelming when the team inaugurated Uppsala University's first robotic course laboratory in late 2022.

“We developed our course laboratory in close collaboration with Stanford University. Here we have five stations equipped with robotic arms, microscopes and pipette handling with capacity for fifteen students. Our social media basically exploded when we posted the first video from inside the lab and students have loved our course Laboratory Automation in Life Sciences from the very start, says Senior Lecturer Jordi Carreras Puigvert.

In the spring of 2025, Ola and Jordi turned their experiences into a spin-off company whose facilities constitute the team's third robotised laboratory, located in Uppsala Science Park just a short walk from the Biomedical Center. Here they have increased the capacity further to nearly 200,000 experiments per week. Another important advance is the ability to combine wet laboratories with imaging in the same system.

“Development is accelerating, and our next goal is to create a fully automated laboratory where self-learning machines, by learning from each experiment, both determine the direction of and implement the next step. This will open up completely new opportunities in both pharmaceutical research and healthcare,” says Ola Spjuth.

text: Magnus Alsne, photo: Mikael Wallerstedt a o