Biomanufacturing underpins products ranging from vaccines to cancer therapies, but developing those products can require experiments that are time-consuming, costly and difficult to reproduce. A new University of Maryland-led project is bringing together artificial intelligence, robotics and real-time biological measurements to examine how those experiments can be designed and carried out differently.
Alan Zaoxing Liu, an assistant professor of computer science with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), is a co-principal investigator on the Collaborative for the Realization of Autonomous Biomanufacturing (CRAB) Lab, a four-year project supported by a $17.3 million award from the National Science Foundation. The lab will be housed at the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (IBBR) in Rockville, Maryland, and will be remotely accessible to researchers across the country.
The project is led by principal investigator William Bentley, the Robert E. Fischell Distinguished Professor and director of the Robert E. Fischell Institute for Biomedical Devices. Liu serves as a co-principal investigator alongside Affiliate Research Professor of Engineering Gregory Payne; Martha Wang, who is the Assistant Director of the Robert E. Fischell Institute for Biomedical Devices; and Hussain Dahodwala, an Associate Research Professor and Fellow at IBBR.
“This is a tremendously exciting moment,” Liu said. “I've been building the systems that make AI fast and reliable, and this award is a chance to apply that work to something as tangible as making medicines.”
The CRAB Lab is one of 20 Programmable Cloud Laboratory Node sites supported through an NSF initiative to develop AI-enabled laboratories for automated science and engineering. Researchers will be able to program workflows that design, run and analyze biomanufacturing experiments while automated instruments and AI systems collect data and help determine what steps to take next.
Liu’s group is responsible for the project’s data and AI backbone. That work includes managing the large volumes of measurement data generated by laboratory instruments, coordinating experiments from beginning to end and training models to recognize what Liu describes as “biological vital signs,” or patterns that can indicate whether a biomanufacturing process is operating as expected or beginning to drift.
For Liu, the project extends research he has pursued in computer systems, networking, and large-scale data infrastructure. His research at UMD includes designing scalable and reliable systems for processing and monitoring data. The CRAB Lab will apply that work in an environment where computing systems interact directly with physical experiments.
“Building AI that actually runs a lab, not just a benchmark, is exactly the kind of challenge I hoped to take on,” Liu said. “I'm grateful to NSF, and to William Bentley and the IBBR team for bringing computer science into the effort from day one.”
The project will use bioelectronic measurement tools developed through UMD partnerships with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The tools are designed to produce high-volume, high-speed measurements for training AI models. Those models could identify combinations of measurements associated with product quality and other process characteristics, giving the automated system information it can use as an experiment proceeds.
“Almost everything in modern medicine, from vaccines to cancer therapies, depends on biomanufacturing, but the experiments behind it are slow, expensive and often hard to reproduce,” Liu said. “We're building AI agents that can design an experiment, hand it to the robots, monitor the data in real time and decide what to try next, so a scientist can log in from anywhere and have results the next morning.”
Remote access is also intended to expand access to automated biomanufacturing equipment. The lab is expected to initially serve 30 biopharmaceutical companies through the Advanced Mammalian Biomanufacturing Innovation Center.
Bentley, who is also a member of the UMD Center of Excellence in Microbiome Sciences, said what excites him most is how the lab is “contributing to a national resource” that researchers across academia, industry and government can draw on.
“That shortens the path from idea to result by months,” Liu said. “Just as important, a graduate student at a small school will have the same AI-driven lab at their fingertips as a large company, and that kind of access changes who gets to do the science.”
—Story adapted from an article by Samuel Malede Zewdu, CS Communications