ARC - Autonomous Research Continuity - A national resource to protect UK life sciences R&D against disruption

2020年见证了人们记忆中前所未有的商业颠覆。在生命科学领域，实验室突然关闭，研发立即陷入停滞。英国的制药公司，每家都有数万名员工；40多所顶尖大学都有活跃的研究项目；遍布全国的众多生物技术公司；甚至连英国公共卫生部及其国家生物银行资源都在3月23日至5月10日被关闭，影响深远。生命科学实验室操作复杂的、多阶段的过程，例如为了研究目的在体外培养人类细胞和组织。这些过程的终止是破坏性的、不可挽回的和代价高昂的。更不用说挽救生命的新疗法的延误了。到目前为止，生命科学实验室都是由人类操作，并依赖于人类。然而，未来的实验室将是自主的、机器人操作的，因此能够适应中断，并与不断变化的工作性质相适应。ARC将利用Arctoris（领先的外包自主实验室）现有的专有机器人实验室基础设施，并通过创新建立新的能力，以支撑国家实验室连续性资源“ARC”。Arc将完全自主地运作，以挽救中断的过程，并为全国制药、学术和生物技术研究中心的生命科学实验室的研究活动提供连续性。Arc将成为英国在整个临床前药物发现和开发管道中提供细胞、生化和生物物理实验过程的值得信赖和有弹性的资源——从目标和hit识别一直到体内研究。Arctoris在英国牛津拥有机器人设备，是全自动化实验领域的全球领导者，但尚未具备完全支持足够规模和多样性的自动化过程所需的技术，以确保国家研发工作。ARC将扩展目前用于提供全自动药物发现实验的专有机器人和计算技术，并使ARC能够支持全国性的生命科学研究活动。通过ARC， Arctoris将完成一项实验开发计划，以扩大机器人细胞处理能力的广度和过程的计算编排，以维持并行的数百个活动。ARC和它的实验发展计划，代表了英国生命科学研发迈向稳定和弹性未来的最大机会，并在面对快速发展和苛刻的工作环境时保持我们的全球竞争力地位。

2020 has witnessed business disruption like no-other in living memory. In the life sciences sector, laboratories were abruptly closed, immediately bringing R&D to a standstill. Pharmaceutical companies in the UK, with tens of thousands of staff each; over 40 top tier universities each with active research programmes; numerous biotechnology companies across the country; even Public Health England and its national biobank resource - all were shut down from March 23rd to May 10th with far-reaching repercussions. Life sciences laboratories operate complex, multi-stage processes such as the growth of human cells and tissues in vitro for research purposes. Termination of these processes is destructive, irretrievable and costly. Not to mention the delays to life-saving new treatments.Until now, life science laboratories were operated by, and dependent on, humans. The laboratories of tomorrow, however, will be autonomous, robotically operated, and therefore resilient to disruption, and compatible with the evolving nature of work.ARC will exploit existing proprietary robotic laboratory infrastructure within Arctoris, the leading outsourced autonomous laboratory, and innovate to establish new competencies that will underpin a national laboratory continuity resource, the 'Arc'. The Arc will operate fully autonomously to salvage disrupted processes and provide continuity to research activity for life science laboratories in pharmaceutical, academic and biotech research centres nation-wide. The Arc will become the UK's trusted and resilient resource for the provision of cellular, biochemical and biophysical experimental processes along the entire pre-clinical drug discovery and development pipeline - from target and hit identification all the way until in vivo studies.Arctoris, with its robotic facilities in Oxford, UK, is the global leader in fully automated experimentation but does not yet have the technology required to fully support sufficient scale and diversity of automated processes to secure national R&D efforts. ARC will expand on proprietary robotic and computational technologies that are currently used for delivering fully automated drug discovery experiments and enable the Arc to support nation-wide life sciences research activities. Through ARC Arctoris will complete a plan of experimental development to expand the breadth of robotic cell handling competency and the computational orchestration of processes to sustain hundreds of activities in parallel.ARC, and its experimental development plans, represent the greatest chance for UK life sciences R&D to step forward into a stable and resilient future and to maintain our position of global competitiveness in the face of a rapidly evolving and demanding work environment.