Inside the ‘self-driving’ lab revolution

From the article:

The robotic platform at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, is the brainchild of autonomous-lab pioneer Ross King. It is powered by artificial intelligence, self-driving and “fairly quiet”, King says. But it’s also fast. Working at full speed, Eve’s robotic arm can move a few metres per second, with a positional accuracy of a fraction of a millimetre. The team usually runs Eve slower than that — otherwise, King says, “it’s too scary”.

Eve automates the process of early-stage drug design. One of Eve’s early achievements came in 2018, around three years after it was created, when it identified that the common antimicrobial compound triclosan can target an enzyme that is crucial to the survival of Plasmodium malaria parasites during their dormant phase in the liver1. To do this, Eve independently screened some 1,600 chemicals and modelled how their structure related to their activity to predict which ones were worth testing. King and his group armed the robot with background knowledge and a machine-learning framework for developing hypotheses. Eve then used those elements to design experiments to test these hypotheses and, crucially, performed them itself. The finding gave researchers a potential route to fighting treatment-resistant malaria. “It’s trying to make the scientific method in a machine,” says King.

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Hiring a student for the job would probably have been cheaper, King admits. But his newest robot, Genesis, will be able to do enough experiments to make the process economically feasible3. King estimates that Genesis will cost £1 million (US$1.3 million) to build — the same price as Adam or Eve individually — but he estimates that it will eventually be at least an order of magnitude cheaper than human labour. King plans to use the system — which occupies one-fifth of floor space than Eve does — to model how genes, proteins and small molecules interact in cells. Part of that will involve taking around 10,000 mass-spectrometry measurements each day.

Chemist and computer scientist Alán Aspuru-Guzik at the University of Toronto in Canada supervises a fleet of 50 self-driving autonomous robots across several labs and universities. Known as the Acceleration Consortium, it is funded by a grant worth Can$200 million (US$146 million).

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With around 22,000 square metres of automated lab space at its AI Science Factory (AISF), the company plans to provide research and development services to pharmaceutical companies, materials-science firms and other research-intensive organizations. This year, it received about £500,000 from the UK government’s Advanced Research and Innovation Agency to test whether its self-driving robot — AI NanoScientist — can synthesize and improve the stability of colloidal nanoparticles, tiny particles suspended in a liquid medium.

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That’s not to say robots can do everything humans can. “You can’t put a robot arm into a cage and catch a mouse in a corner, for instance. Human dexterity is amazing compared to current robots,” says King. Gregoire echoes the point, noting that some processes are simply too expensive to automate for now.

I guess they're taking some of the labor out of laboratories?