Abstract
The constantly growing interest and range of applications of advanced cell, gene and regenerative therapies raise the need for efficient production of biological material and novel treatment technologies. Many of the production and manipulation processes of such materials are still manual and, therefore, need to be transferred to a fully automated execution. Developers of such systems face several challenges, one of which is mechanical and communication interfaces in biotechnological devices. In the present state, many devices are still designed for manual use and rarely provide a connection to external software for receiving commands and sending data. However, a trend towards automation on the device market is clearly visible, and the communication protocol, Open Platform Communications Data Access (OPC DA), seems to become established as a standard in biotech devices. A rising number of vendors offer software for device control and automated processing, some of which even allow the integration of devices from multiple manufacturers. The high, application-specific need in functionalities, flexibility and adaptivity makes it difficult to find the best solution and, in many cases, leads to the creation of new custom-designed software. This report shall give an overview of existing technologies, devices and software for laboratory automation of biotechnological processes. Furthermore, it presents an outlook for possible future developments and standardizations.
Highlights
Biotechnological products play an ever-increasing role for several sectors of the producing industry
One part of good manufacturing practice (GMP) that is especially important for automation in biotechnology is good automated manufacturing practice (GAMP), which sets further requirements onto software design, including efficient, error-free and well-tested source codes and programs as well as comprehensible, reliable and safe data storage [16]
A special client is needed that must be integrated in the controlling program for enabling it to communicate with the Open Platform Communications Data Access (OPC DA)-Server and must be obtained separately from corresponding software providers
Summary
Biotechnological products play an ever-increasing role for several sectors of the producing industry. Meat grown in the laboratory may be found in grocery stores [1] Another novel sector is that of synthetic biology, where biological products and their gene codes are fully engineered to create food, medicine or even replacements for technical parts [2]. Employers do not need to be trained any more on complex production steps Companies can focus their personal resources on development, testing and maintenance rather than production [3,4]. The downsides to the mentioned advantages are the challenges that institutes and companies face during their change from manual to automated production. Those lie in the transfer of manual to automated production and in meeting the high regulatory requirements of biotechnological production
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