Robotics: modular platform for antibiotics research

The high cost and limited commercial value of new antibiotics discourage their development, as they are used sparingly to avoid resistance. To address this, a new robotics platform aims to simplify the development of active substances to combat the problem of antibiotic resistance. While we cannot always prevent resistance, this approach offers a promising solution.

In this interview with MEDICA-tradefair.com, Prof. Pierre Stallforth explains how this platform can be a great help for research and is intended to support the development of active substances.

Prof. Stallforth, you have set up a robotics platform at Leibniz-HKI for the search for new antibiotics. What was the impetus for this?

Prof. Pierre Stallforth: Especially in academic research, there are often limitations in the experimental setup that prevent us from performing certain experiments at a higher throughput. However, the new robotics platform is not only intended to enable high throughput. We also want to use it to design completely new experiments that, due to their complexity, cannot be performed by humans without errors. Furthermore, we can thus relieve the capacities of our employees so that they can devote themselves more to creative questions.

What challenges do you face, particularly in the development of antibiotics?

Stallforth: The development of antibiotics, or anti-infectives in general, is a problem for society as a whole and a global problem. Many pharmaceutical companies are pulling out of this area because research is costly and new antibiotics that are resistance-breaking are usually only used as back-up antibiotics. This makes development difficult and unattractive.

For us in basic research, this means that we must make our research attractive to industry. We would like to use this automation platform to make the series of experiments necessary for drug development better and easier. We need robotic support, for example in liquid handling or in operating the equipment.

How can the platform facilitate drug development in concrete terms?

Stallforth: The platform is highly modular and very flexible, which means we can design a wide range of assays. The synergistic combination of active ingredients is very exciting in anti-infective research. Drug combinations are already being administered for many diseases, but the systematic search for synergistic agents is no longer feasible manually. The number of pipetting steps is so high that humans reach the limit in terms of their susceptibility to errors and also physically. Robots can perform these steps with the highest precision over a period of days.

On the other hand, certain molecular biology steps can also be automated, for example the search for active ingredients from genetic material. We now have access to diverse sources of modern and prehistoric genetic material, for example from Neanderthals, through analytical and bioinformatics methods. Through automation, we can now effectively search for and produce active ingredients.

What potential applications do you see for the platform beyond the development of antibiotics and anti-infectives?

Stallforth: For us, this is also a communication platform where researchers from different disciplines can come together and design new experiments for the first time that were not possible manually. I think that by making this expertise available, we make it possible to bring together many different research topics. In that sense, there are no limits for now.

We need to determine: What are important, innovative questions that can be answered and that perhaps different disciplines can collaborate on? The future will show in which direction we will work more intensively. Due to the modular structure, there are hardly any limits to research. What limits us here is our own creativity.