A Tokyo lab replaced human hands with robots to run sensitive biomedical experiments, promising scale and consistency but raising questions about oversight.
A new laboratory has opened in Tokyo at the University of Science, where medical experiments are now carried out by robots, rather than by human researchers.
The university’s Center for Robotics Innovation currently employs ten robots, including the humanoid Maholo LabDroid, with no human involvement.
The tasks of the two-armed systems include delicate actions: transferring a fixed amount of reagents and opening temperature-controlled equipment doors to place or retrieve items.
Cell culture, programmed to run automatically, can also be performed without human participation.
The university plans to increase the number of robots to about 2,000 by 2040, integrating them with artificial intelligence.
Prospects and Applications
New systems will be able to perform nearly all research tasks – from proposing hypotheses to experimental testing.
“We want to make Japanese science the best in the world”
– Keiichi Nakayama
Maholo LabDroid has already been deployed in a Kobe clinic specializing in ophthalmology. There the robot is used in studies related to induced pluripotent stem cells, particularly for cell culture.
In the future, the division plans to expand the use of robotics across various experimental directions, which could reduce the burden on people and improve the reproducibility of research.
It was also reported that SoftBank Robotics announced on February 2 that Pepper had entered the Guinness World Records as the world’s first mass-produced humanoid robot.
Such development underscores the growing role of robotic systems in biomedical research and opens the door to future integrations between laboratories and clinics.
AloJapan.com