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ABB Robotics and the College of Texas Medical Department’s (UTMB) Life Sciences and Healthcare Lab have developed an automatic neutralizing antibody testing system. The robotic system can decide a person’s immunity to varied strains of COVID, and carry out different virus testing.
The system is ready to improve the variety of neutralizing antibody exams carried out from 15 a day to over 1,000 each day.
“The power to hold out extra each day exams is the important thing to producing extra information on particular person immunity profiles that may assist management the additional unfold of the virus,” Dr. Michael Laposata, professor and chairman of the division of Pathology at UTMB, mentioned. “By reworking the speed at which testing may be carried out and eliminating the necessity for giant numbers of laboratory employees being uncovered to the potential threat of an infection in handbook testing, the automated system we’ve developed with ABB offers an correct, quick, versatile and protected approach of assembly our objectives.”
Growing the variety of each day exams may also help UTMB researchers higher perceive how efficient COVID vaccines have been. COVID’s many mixed mutations have made it difficult for researchers to find out the best safety for every variant.
The system goals to detect a SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibody with out cross-reaction with different infections. The ensuing information can be utilized by the particular person being examined researchers, and native policymakers to assist them make extra knowledgeable choices about find out how to reduce the chance of additional spreading the virus.
“This undertaking is a transparent instance of how robotics can improve pace and effectivity, whereas making work safer for the researchers concerned,” Daniel Navarro, Managing Director of Shopper Segments and Service Robotics at ABB, mentioned. “Working carefully with UTMB, we’re combining our experience [in] biology, lab course of, automation and software program to develop and deploy an automatic robotic answer that considerably advances and informs our response to the COVID pandemic.”
ABB used its RobotStudio offline programming software program to mannequin, iterate and check totally different mixtures of lab tools and robotic positions to develop the system. Your complete course of, from inception to operation, took simply 18 months.
“What we managed to attain on this undertaking inside such a brief area of time is extraordinary—many multimillion-dollar firms take a number of years to create options just like the one we’ve developed in a fraction of the time,” Juan Garcia, director of Laboratory Companies at UTMB, mentioned.
