I-Corps: Fully Automated and Versatile Biofoundry

这个I-Corps项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力将是提供一种全自动和多功能的生物铸造技术，以加速生物技术的研究和开发（R D）。生物技术产业每年在全世界的研究和开发上花费超过350亿美元。然而，目前的研发过程主要依赖于经验丰富的研究科学家的手工工作。这种人工操作速度慢，成本高，容易出现人为错误，制约了该行业的发展。这种全自动化和高度通用的生物铸造的应用可以帮助生物技术公司大大加快他们的研发和降低成本。因此，研发的风险可以进一步降低，从而能够为市场开发更多的生物基特种化学品、燃料、污染治理以及医疗保健产品。 初步的工作表明，生物发酵技术可能在发酵公司的菌株开发市场上有一个初步的机会。这个I-Corps项目建议研究先进生物制造技术的具体市场。这种机器人平台的第一个原型已经在概念验证研究中证明了其吞吐量和多功能性。它能够在最少的人为干预下进行大多数分子和细胞生物学实验。凭借其模块化的硬件和软件系统，该平台可以快速重新配置为工程生物系统的各种任务。模块化系统架构还允许对以前的实验室自动化系统中很难实现的长而复杂的工作流程进行编程。当用于组装复杂的DNA分子时，它实现了超过400个构建体/天的吞吐量，成功率接近100%。这样的吞吐量和一致性是传统手工操作无法达到的。这种能力为通过计算机模拟设计快速构建生物系统（例如蛋白质、细胞和植物）打开了大门。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project will be to provide a fully automated and versatile biological foundry technology biotechnology to accelerate the biotechnology research and development (R&D). Biotechnology industry spends over $35 billion/year on research and development world-wide. However, the current R&D process mainly relies on manual work of highly experienced research scientists. Such manual operation is slow, expensive, and prone to human errors, which has constrained the growth of this industry. The application of such fully automated and highly versatile biofoundry may help biotech companies greatly expedite their R&D and reduce the cost. Thus, the risk of R&D can be further reduced to enable the development of more bio-based specialty chemicals, fuels, pollution remediation, as well as healthcare products for the market. Initial work suggest the biofoundry technology may have an initial opportunity in the strain development market for fermentation companies.This I-Corps project proposes to study the specific markets for the advanced biomanufacturing technologies. The first prototype of such a robotic platform has demonstrated its throughput and versatility in the proof-of-concept studies. It is capable of conducting most molecular and cellular biology experiments with minimal human intervention. With its modular hardware and software systems, this platform can be rapidly reconfigured to a variety of tasks for engineering biological systems. The modular system architecture also allows programming of long and complex workflows that were very difficult to implement in previous lab automation systems. When used for assembling complex DNA molecules, it achieved a throughput of over 400 constructs/day with close to 100% success rate. Such throughput and consistency was unattainable by conventional manual operations. Such capacity opens the door to fast prototyping of biological systems by in silico design, such as proteins, cells, and plants.