Question: how do you use robots with what you do ?

Elizabeth Ratcliffe answered on 13 Mar 2014:

Hi rosieroo223,
I use the robots to grow cells including stem cells that can be used to make new medicines and regenerative therapies (medicines that help the body fix itself). There are lots of new medicines and regenerative therapies being developed in labs all across the UK and the world. Developing new medicines is very expensive so they are developed in small amounts / volumes but as the medicines get closer to being able to be used on patients they need to be able to be made in much larger volumes to treat all the patients that need it.
For example, if 1 million people need the medicine but we can only make enough to treat 10 people, or it takes 6 months to make enough medicine to treat 1 person, it just won’t work. The medicine will never get to the people that need it, the company won’t be able to afford to make it and the hospitals won’t be able to afford to use the treatment.
I use robots to find ways of making the cells and medicines in larger volumes safely, this includes taking processes that are done at the laboratory bench and figuring out how a robot could do the process…then doing it…and making sure the processes are safe and are as good or better than before.
For example, on Zach’s profile page he has a picture of some of his cells in culture flasks, one of my big robots can perform the same work Zach does on these flasks but my robot can handle a lot more flasks than Zach or myself could work on, and it can work 24 hours a day without getting tired.
I use robots to help make sure we can go from treating 1 patient to many patients and that the medicine is the same quality for everyone who will receive it, whether the medicine is made in different parts of the UK or elsewhere.