MIT Robots May Help Bring Down the Cost of Biologics

Over the last two years, Multiply Labs has helped pharmaceutical companies produce biologic drugs with its robotic manufacturing platform. The robots can work around the clock, precisely formulating small batches of drugs to help companies run clinical trials more quickly. Now the company–which was founded by Fred Parietti, a recent MIT PhD graduate, and former visiting PhD at MIT Alice Melocchi–is hoping to bring the speed and precision of its robots to a new type of advanced treatment. In a recently announced project, Multiply Labs is developing a new robotic manufacturing platform to ease bottlenecks in the creation of cell therapies. These therapies have proven to be a powerful tool in the fight against cancer, but their production is incredibly labor intensive, contributing to their high cost. CAR-T cell therapy, for example, requires scientists to extract blood from a patient, isolate immune cells, genetically engineer those cells, grow the new cells, and inject them back into the patient. In many cases, each of those steps must be repeated for each patient.