Development of automatic cell culture system for cell therapy and regenerative medicine

— Robotized system for high quality cell product preparation —

Abstract

We carried out R&D in order to dramatically facilitate cell culture for clinical use, the difficulty of which had been a major hurdle in adapting basic research to clinical applications of cell therapy and regenerative medicine. The world’s first robotized cell culture system (MDX) was developed by Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd., and the systems were installed in Shinshu University and AIST. Based on the technologies of the MDX system, we developed a novel cell culture system R-CPX (Robotized-Cell Processing eXpert system) which can produce high quality medical cell products. This system does not need to be placed in a CPC (cell processing center), which is expensive to construct and difficult to manage. We aimed to realize rapid progress of various cell therapies and production of medical cell products of global standard quality.