Robots lend a hand to automate pathology testing
14 October 2024 
Clinical laboratories, facing increasing pressure to achieve faster turnaround times and reduce errors, are turning to industrial automation and robotics technologies. A UK automation specialist has recently helped a French lab to automate previously manual processes.
A new blood test for detecting more than 50 types of cancer has shown “real promise” following a UK trial of more than 6,000 people. It’s one of several new tests being developed to increase the chances of early diagnosis for a variety of medical conditions, potentially saving millions of lives. However, mass implementation of new types of blood testing needed remains a major challenge.
One company rising to this challenge is UK-based PAA (Peak Analysis and Automation), which specialises in automation technologies for research institutions, as well as pharmaceutical, biotechnology and laboratory automation companies.
PAA is helping develop an automated cold storage interface for one of Europe’s largest private pathology providers, Laboratoire Cerba, located in Paris.
There is a growing need for such providers to adapt to the emergence of new blood-testing technologies and blood biomarker research. However, there is currently no way of connecting the research to the pathology production platforms.
“A key requirement for Lab Cerba to meet the growing number of blood testing possibilities is the ability to quickly sort and store the samples at different temperatures,” explains PAA’s R&D director, Jon Newman-Smith. “For example, if you’ve had a blood test and you’re waiting for the results, the sample will need to be sent to cold storage – which operates at 4°C – to preserve it in case any further analysis or an additional test is needed. Other samples need to be kept for longer with storage at –20°C.”
One of the biggest obstacles that Lab Cerba has faced is a lack of cold storage capacity in existing TLA (total laboratory automation) systems. Instead, it previously opted for an alternative approach from a different area of life sciences which provided a tailored cold storage facility that could increase capacity significantly if it could be integrated into the existing TLA system.
Without an integrated way of processing all of the samples by the TLA – around 2,000 per hour – they would have to be sorted by hand. The Lab Cerba team realised that processing individual tubes by hand would limit the potential benefits of a fully automated pathology lab.
After learning of the success of a previous project in another part of the Cerba group, the team approached Newman-Smith and his colleagues at PAA to help resolve the problem and to explore ways of achieving faster sample retrieval and rapid turn-around times.
The key challenge was to create a workcell in which the sample tubes could be taken from the TLA system and then sorted into a format accepted by the storage system, while optimising both the capacity and throughput of the storage platform.
Some of the challenges presented by this approach were: coping with differing tube sizes; a lack of sample tracking data; and variations in throughput demands during the day.
Covid experience
This was not the first large-scale sample-processing system that the PAA team had been asked to deliver, having designed and built workcells for Covid-19 testing during the height of the pandemic.
One of the key lessons from this work was the need to take inspiration from other, more established automation methods to deliver the required speed, robustness and repeatability.
In this case, PAA turned to Scara robots from Mitsubishi Electric that it had used in its Covid testing workcells for UKHSA. “That was the first time we had three robots in very close proximity running at full speed, so we knew they could operate in a narrow working envelope with reliable collision avoidance,” Newman-Smith recalls. “While working to an ambitious target takt time, given its pedigree in manufacturing pick-and-place applications, we were confident the Scara robot was the right choice.”
The workcell that PAA developed for Lab Cerba includes four Mitsubishi FR-Series Scara robots with 20kg payload capacities and a maximum reach of 1m. The robots, powered by Mitsubishi’s Melsec iQ-R controller, can reach speeds of 13,283mm/s. The controller also supervises the rest of the handling system, which is automated using MR-J4 servodrives and E800 variable-speed drives.
The workcell is currently undergoing final commissioning at Lab Cerba’s purpose-built facility in Paris. While there is currently no direct integration between the PAA workcell and the TLA, Lab Cerba technicians can now load the workcell with racks of samples, instead of having to process each sample manually in and out of the cold storage system.
This will increase productivity significantly. PAA is collaborating with TLA partners to create a bi-directional physical and data connection with TLA systems. Using PAA’s integration software this connection will provide the bridge between research and diagnostics, enabling faster scientific breakthroughs in novel blood biomarker screening. The ability to conduct novel screening assays at scale will further accelerate pathology automation in Europe.
Since PAA developed the automated cold storage interface for Lab Cerba, other potential customers have identified hospitals and pathology groups throughout Europe that could benefit from this type of platform.
“We’ve effectively taken industrial automation methodologies and approaches in technology and applied them to this industry,” Newman-Smith concludes.
