A new smart research robot accelerates research on cancer treatments. The new robot system finds optimal treatment combinations.
'We have built a robot system that plans and conducts experiments
with many substances, and draws its own conclusions from the results.
The idea is to gradually refine combinations of substances so that they
kill cancer cells without harming healthy cells', says Dr Claes
Andersson, also a leading scientist in the project.
Instead of just combining a couple of substances at a time, the new
lab robot has the ability to handle on the order of a dozen drugs
simultaneously. The aim for the future is to be able to handle many
more, preferably hundreds.
'We are now one among the few laboratories in the world with this
type of lab robot. However, so far researchers have only used the
systems to look for combinations that kills the cancer cells, not taking
the side effects into account', says Mats Gustafsson.
The next step in the development is to make the robot system more
automated and smarter. The current version still involves a few manual
steps that could be automated. The scientists also want to build more
prior knowledge into the guiding algorithm of the robot, for example,
prior knowledge about drug targets and disease pathways.
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