In Europe's aging society, a steadily increasing incidence of cases of the joint disease osteoarthritis can be observed. This is to be addressed by novel and innovative stem cell-based therapies, which have shown promising success in laboratory trials in recent years. To fully exploit this potential, there is a lack of more data on the therapeutic effects of stem cells and further a lack of methods to produce the biological materials for these therapeutic methods in a scalable, high-quality and cost-effective manner.
Our solution
The Fraunhofer IPT brings its experience and expertise gained in the StemCellFactory and AUTOSTEM projects to AutoCRAT by implementing the fully automated production of all cell types mentioned above. For this purpose, the laboratory processes are transferred into automatable process steps in cooperation with the partners. Subsequently, the AUTOSTEM and StemCellDiscovery systems already available at the institute will be adapted and expanded mechanically, in terms of automation and software, so that finally the production of the cells will be implemented.
Consortium
Project Coordinator
- National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG), Ireland
Project Partners
- Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT, Germany
- Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), The Netherlands
- Panaxea B.V. (PAN), The Netherlands
- Pintail Ltd. (PT), Ireland
- Universita Degli Studi Di Genova (UNIGE), Italy
- Universitatsklinikum Essen (UKEssen), Germany
- University Of Gothenburg (UGOT), Sweden
- Valitacell Ltd. (VC), Ireland
Project website
AutoCRAT – Automated Cellular Robot-Assisted Technologies for translation of discovery-led research in Osteoarthritis
Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT