(machine noise) - It takes more than a decade and tens of millions of dollars to get medicine to the people who need it.

And a lot of that testing is done by hand.

- So this is a very common tool that scientists regularly use.

- Which makes creating and testing medicines take longer and cost even more.

Today, automation has transformed how we do cancer screening, distribute vaccines, and conduct mRNA research.

Platforms like this can multiply and experiment or build parts of a vaccine hundreds of thousands of times in a single sweep.

So how do you start handling that?

Cue a robot.

- And that's why labs have gravitated more to these automated liquid handling robotic workstations and liquid flows out of the tip.

- But doing it manually is still a practice in labs not tasked with handling huge sample amounts.

But as they say, use the correct tool for the job.

And in terms of volume, we're talking in the one milliliter range, generally speaking.

So with this handheld pipette, what you can do is you just place the pipette tip into the liquid, you displace the plunger, liquid flows into the tip, and there you have aspirated your liquid inside the tip.

From there, you can then transfer it to some other labware to then dispense it and liquid flows out of the tip into the well.

- But it could always be done better, right?

- Right, so while this shows just a one-to-one transfer, what if you have a lot of different liquids that you need to transfer?

You're processing many samples.

- In the 1950s, as Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was rolled out, production was slow and risky.

Technicians even used mouth pipetting, a method that put them at risk of infection, obviously.

Each drop was handled by hand.

By 2020, the COVID pandemic made clear that manual methods could not keep up.

Automation became essential to produce vaccines at the scale that was needed.

- COVID demonstrated the necessity of such automation because there was such a demand for high volume of samples to be turned around in a quick, reliable, and safe way.

- Vaccine work moved from single test tubes to flat plates, holding many samples.

- It's flat, though.

I mean, how do you put a pipette in this thing?

- It's very thin, and there's a very thin, similar, it's analogous to that of a handheld pipette because there is a small piston inside that also moves up to displace the air to actually pick up the liquid.

What we can do on our robotic workstations is that we can have many of these pipettes to process hundreds and thousands of samples.

- So we watched how this all fit together and how the robot figures this out in a demonstration.

It starts with getting the liquid out of these tiny tubes.

That's a crazy black tip you got there.

- Well, it's black because during manufacturing, the tip is infused with graphite.

We have circuits built into our pipettes, which means as the tip makes contact with a conductive liquid, it will ground that circuit, and now the robot knows exactly where the liquid is.

- The robot has to first get things into position.

It first moves what are called microtiter plates, which are plates with 96 multiple small wells that are used as miniature test tubes, like we saw in Dr.

Salk's polio lab.

- Now that it's been presented into the workspace of the pipetter, we have what's called an IPG, an internal plate gripper channel, which is gripping this microtiter plate and is going to move and transport it to the left side of the deck to be staged for downstream processing.

- What that means is that this plate is being put to the side and will wait for samples to be put into it in a moment.

- The gripper, using a strain gauge, has detected force.

It knows that it's holding an object.

- The robot then takes what is called a random access plate holding sample tubes in rows with these green caps.

This plate has barcodes, which are scanned by cameras to match the sample cups to be shipped out.

(machine whirring) The tube caps were removed row by row with 12 separate motors.

Those are put to the side as well.

Now that the samples have been processed in our demonstration, those tips are thrown away.

At that point, the other arm will take the microtiter plate with the 96 little cups for science and put them into position.

- So our 96 multiprobe head is now aspirating another reagent out of a trough.

We'll dispense this into our sample tubes that have been decapped.

- The machine pulls reagent from a trough and adds it into the sample tubes.

It then moves those samples into plates where the more ingredient mixing happens.

It repeats the process, handling 96 samples at once and stamping the results onto multiple plates.

- Demonstrating the power of this type of liquid handling automation, we're preparing 596 plates, which is 480 samples, including decapping of tubes, processing of barcodes in a very rapid amount of time.

A human simply just can't do this and wouldn't want to.

- Speed matters and so does safety.

Inside those trays are patient samples and other substances too dangerous to risk with human hands alone.

- Lab operators are handling biohazardous material.

This is often human samples that they're handling or they're dealing with very volatile reagents and chemicals.

- Here in North Carolina's Research Triangle Park, drug and research giants all depend on faster, more reliable solutions and so do their counterparts around the world.

- Accuracy and reliability and safety is important.

And so by adopting this type of automation and this type of technology, you can be assured that you have much more reliable results in the end.

(upbeat music)