🦾 Medra builds autonomous lab, robots controlled with everyday language

• Medra has raised $52 million to build a 38,000-square-foot autonomous robot lab in the Bay Area.
• Scientists can direct the robots with everyday language, much like writing to ChatGPT.
• The robots work around the clock on drug research for partners such as Genentech and Addition Therapeutics.

Physical AI runs the experiments

Medra develops software that lets robots carry out biological experiments on their own. Scientists can give the robots instructions in everyday language, much like writing to a chatbot. The robots then perform the tasks and log every detail: the angle of the pipette, how deep it dips into the well, the time between adding reagents, and the mixing speed.

All the data is fed into what the company calls a vision-language-lab-action model. The system can reason about what happened in an experiment and propose adjustments for the next run. The software is a combination of commercial language models and in-house models. The AI system has learned to operate more than 75 percent of the instruments scientists use today.

$63 million in total funding

The latest funding round of $52 million was led by Human Capital and brings Medra's total funding to $63 million. The round closed just weeks after the company began talking publicly about its work in September.

CEO Michelle Lee, who holds a doctorate in robotics from Stanford, left a planned position at New York University in 2022 to start Medra. The company operates out of a space in San Francisco's Mission district, where robotic arms on steel tables handle cells and lab chemicals.

Five systems already deployed with customers

Medra began shipping systems toward the end of last year and now has five installations with customers across the United States. The company only works with paying biopharma partners and avoids unpaid pilot projects. In addition to Genentech, a subsidiary of Roche, Medra collaborates with Addition Therapeutics on gene editing.

The same core hardware can handle gene editing, protein engineering, immunology, and antibody work by swapping in different instruments and programming. The robots can run experiments overnight and on weekends, alerting customers if a sensor detects a problem.

The lab will produce data for AI models

The new lab, called Medra Lab 001, was built in under 90 days and will house hundreds of robots working around the clock. Lee argues that AI for science lacks the right kind of data. She compares it with Google DeepMind's AlphaFold2, which won a Nobel Prize and was trained on a few terabytes of experimental data collected over many years. OpenAI's O1 model may have been trained on data measured in petabytes. At the current pace, it would take about 13,000 years to reach that scale through experimental biology alone.

Pharmaceutical companies usually only document the final outcome of a study, not all the small attempts and mistakes that led to the right method. Medra logs every step, including failed experiments, so that the models can reason about why things worked or didn't.

After two decades of lab automation, still only about 5 percent of lab instruments are automated, and much of the work has been outsourced overseas. Medra focuses on early discovery research, before a drug candidate moves into clinical trials, which means the systems are not under direct FDA oversight.

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