Stem Cell and Organoid Facility benefits from Biorobotics upgrades

Biorobotics equipment purchases have been proceeding throughout this year ahead of a planned redevelopment for early next year that will enable the Stem Cell Medicine Group to develop Goods Manufacturing Process (GMP) protocols. This started with the purchase of the Hamilton STAR liquid handling platform in September 2022 followed by the Cytomat 10C automated incubator in March 2023. Together, these machines will be able to handle much of the manual labour involved with maintaining the stem cell lines for the Stem Cell Medicine Research Group, and as a bonus, there may be additional capability to support the Stem Cell and Organoid Facility. These two instruments are currently (as of October 2023) rounding out their installation and integration, ready for application development and integration into the Facility’s workflow.

CMRI has also acquired an ImageXpress Confocal HT.ai High-Content Imaging system, purchased in August 2023 and due for installation this month. This will enable the rapid and scaled-up study of stem cell and organoids for characterisation and experimentation.

In addition, a CellCelector single cell cloning instrument has been ordered which will enable high-throughput selection of clones for cell line derivation and is due to arrive in April 2024. This will be installed, in combination with the other instruments and a yet-to-be-purchased robotic interface between them, in a new Biorobotics facility, early 2024. This facility’s primary focus will be implementation of GMP for Stem Cell Medicine research, but its additional capacity will also enable much of the work which is done now in the Stem Cell and Organoid Facility to be highly automated and able to serve a wider range of researchers effectively.

CMRI’s Stem Cell and Organoid Facility offers a range of stem cell services, including an end-to-end workflow (iPSC reprogramming and maintenance, differentiation, organoid development and functional analysis) for a range of organoids including, but not limited to, cortical, whole cerebral, cardiac, and kidney organoids. Our goal is to create a widely available resource of human pluripotent stem cell-derived products and derivative tissues to provide functional disease models and accelerate our customers’ research. 

Contact stemcor@cmri.org.au for more information