A group such as RIKEN announced that robots and AI = artificial intelligence have found the optimum conditions for creating cells of the retina of the eye from iPS cells and developed a technology to automatically culture them.
This research was announced on the 27th by a group such as RIKEN in Kobe City.
When creating various tissues from iPS cells, it is necessary to repeatedly transfer the culture medium and inject chemicals, and until now, skilled technicians have tried and errored to find the optimal method. There was only.
In the group, AI and a robot with an arm like a human arm are combined, and the robot automatically cultures while gradually changing the conditions of 7 items such as the concentration of the drug and the speed at which the drug is injected according to the instructions of AI. Through trial and error, AI searched for the optimal procedure.
And from the combination of 144 conditions, 91% of iPS cells changed to retinal cells when the robot cultured according to the procedure that AI considered appropriate.
According to the group, this is on par with skilled technicians, and the quality is comparable to that used in clinical studies that are actually transplanted into the human eye.
Motoki Kanda, Senior Researcher at RIKEN, said, "If many experiments can be automated by applying this result, researchers can concentrate on other experiments. It should be possible to accelerate research in the field of life science." I was there.