3 ways automation can speed-up and scale vaccine development

Russell Green, director product growth for Drug Discovery and Synthetic Biology, Automata, describes three reasons why automation should become an integral part of the vaccine development process.  

As vaccine development continues to advance and innovative techniques such as mRNA sequencing are being successfully used to deliver results, scientists must focus on fast-tracking progress, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring vaccines are accessible to as many people as possible.

But the complexity of the process – with common barriers being long antigen discovery times, regulatory disputes and lack of knowledge of the human immune system – means vaccines can often take 10-15 years or more to come to market.

Such elongated timelines put the lives of immunocompromised and vulnerable individuals at risk every day. Speeding up this process while keeping accuracy at its highest will be essential to eradicating diseases and keeping the global population healthy.

When the stakes are high, as we saw with the urgent need for COVID-19 vaccines, being able to improve all processes - from data collection to scaling production – while maintaining accuracy, becomes critical. And automation underpins all of this.

1. Increasing the accuracy of vaccine development  

During vaccine research and development, tracking every step of the process is vital. However, many labs still track progress and results on paper, which is susceptible to manual error, especially when tens or hundreds of samples are managed per hour. At a time when a single mistake can cause a U-turn in development, precision is crucial.

By automating data collection and producing digital batch reports, it’s possible for scientists to accurately analyse the results of early drug candidate research, without the risk of error.

This ensures a high level of repeatability and traceability, empowering technicians to process much higher volumes of data samples with greater precision and record them for future use. As seen with how SARS research was used to speed up the development of the COVID-19 vaccine, access to previous research is invaluable.

2. Automating entire workflows

Vaccine development is a long and complex process, with some projects – notably the BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine – having around 50,000 steps required from beginning to end. To ramp up this process, labs often invest in automated tools for specific steps in the workflow, such as bioanalysers to conduct DNA quality control before sequencing. While these tools are excellent solutions for single tasks, they are often bulky and require manual loading and unloading – taking up lab space and elongating development time.  

Making the most out of automation in vaccine development will require labs to think about enabling end-to-end workflows. By using robotics and automation to link each step of the process, lab technicians can transform previously clunky, step-by-step systems into one continuous flow that increases both the scale and precision of vaccine research and development.

3. Creating agile ways of working

The unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of being prepared to deal with the unexpected. When creating vaccines for brand new strains of a disease, or finding the right treatment for a rare condition, scientists need flexibility.

When needs change, or demand increases, scientists should be able to change their workflows to meet new requirements – and quickly. To do this, they should approach automation with a capability first mindset. By adopting this model, it’s possible for single automation tools in the lab to perform multiple processes – such as liquid handing or thermocycling – efficiently. With the same piece of automation technology being optimised to carry out new tasks when needed, labs can meet demand in times of crisis.

Conclusion

With the possibility of more global disease outbreaks in the future, the demand for vaccines to keep populations safe is only set to increase. This means that now more than ever are labs under pressure to scale, and reducing manual processes is critical. While automation can’t solve all obstacles around vaccine development, it can help to significantly reduce time by optimising process, thus helping scientists to produce better results faster.