Treating cancer with automation Cancer is one of the many genetic diseases that Jassi would like to see eradicated . “ When you ' re treating things like leukaemia , patients have to wait a long time for treatment and take really horrific medications – like chemotherapy – which actually , in themselves , cause additional health problems . Chemo can affect the organs , and I think what ' s really hard to see is where children are involved in this .”
Every year , 400,000 children and teenagers develop cancer , most commonly leukaemia , brain cancer or solid tumours . According to the World Health Organisation , there is a cure rate of 80 % for those living in high-income nations , but for those in lowto-middle-income countries , that figure sits at just 30 %. Cancer can be cured with a range of medicine , surgery and radiotherapy , but low-to-middle-income countries report that avoidable childhood cancer deaths arise from obstacles to accessing care .
“ That ' s what ' s affecting the healthcare industry : how do you make these therapies quicker , bring them to market quicker but also make them more cost-effective ?” Jassi says .
The Automata team is powered by the idea that automated gene therapy labs can help to treat patients all over the world more
35,000 Genes hold data for the features passed on to each human from their parents . Each cell in the human body has up to 35,000 genes .
DNA The DNA contained within a gene has instructions for making proteins in the cell , such as the size of your bones or hair texture . effectively , speeding up therapies and saving costs in the long-term .
The engineering path for growing the right cell in gene therapy is very labour intensive . Yet , with automation , scientists can automate some of the processes – particularly earlier on in the culture of developing cell lines .
“ You can run the engineering without the need of people doing the laborious work of pipetting and moving plates from one instrument to another ; these automations would allow labs to work 24 / 7 ,” explains Jassi . “ You can get to the target cell lines that you need much quicker .”
On the other side is the manufacturing process , where many companies in the sector are trying to build instruments for gene therapy .
“ If we can automate , it ' s getting drugs to patients faster and generally doing things quicker . But the other thing that ' s really important with automation is what it allows you to do : it allows you to do things where you reduce human error and achieve consistency , while your experiments are more reliable and accurate , which in turn makes you a lot more accurate and able to repeat processes successfully .”
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