UK grants GBP1.1 million to robotic stem cell research

British Scientists will develop robotics to automate important stem cell research, meaning thousands of experiments will be able to be conducted at once, rather than just a handful being possible by a single scientist.

The consortium is developing drugs to regenerate tissues of the body, to automate its Combicult research experiments. The Plasticell consortium includes University College London (UCL) and the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC).

“At the moment, experiments are done on a trial and error basis and since cell culture work is cumbersome, a scientist can only handle a few experiments at any one time. However, with our technology a scientist could carry out 250,000 experiments in parallel in a couple of weeks,” said Dr Yen Choo, Plasticell’s chief executive.

Plasticell will license the technique and allow the wider research community to benefit from this important technology. Plasticell technology is known as Combinatorial Cell Culture.

The robotic equipment to be developed in the project will enable researchers to test the effects of thousands of different factors, such as growth, nutrients, hormones, or physical conditions on how stem cells differentiate, or how they give rise to tissue cells like lung, heart, brain cells.