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个完全自动化和通用的生物铸造技术生物技术，以加速生物技术的研究和开发。世界范围内，生物技术产业每年在研发上的花费超过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，而且容易出现人为错误，限制了该行业的发展。这种全自动和高度通用的生物铸造厂的应用可以帮助生物技术公司大大加快研发速度，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、污染修复以及医疗保健产品。初步研究表明，生物铸造技术可能在菌种开发市场上为发酵公司提供初步机会。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展示了它的吞吐量和多功能性。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，以适应工程生物系统的各种任务。模块化系统架构还允许编程长而复杂的工作流程，这在以前的实验室自动化系统中很难实现。当用于组装复杂的DNA分子时，它达到了超过400个构建/天的吞吐量，成功率接近100%。这种吞吐量和一致性是传统手工操作无法实现的。这样的能力打开了一扇大门，通过芯片设计的生物系统，如蛋白质，细胞和植物的快速原型。

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.