A Smarter Way to Build Better Biologics
From Design to Deployment: Engineering Predictability
Case Study: Solving Complexity with Confidence
Where PsiBot Makes the Difference
Proven Impact: Superior Producer Clones, Faster
The Future of Cell Line Development
In biopharmaceutical development, time and quality are everything. Every week saved on the path to the clinic can make a meaningful difference for patients waiting on life-changing therapies. This leads to a key question: How can teams accelerate development timelines without sacrificing product quality?
In traditional cell line development (CLD) workflows, clone screening—the process of identifying and selecting the optimal cell clone for protein production—remains a critical bottleneck. Conventional approaches are time-consuming and labor-intensive, often forcing teams to make premature clone selections with limited insight into product quality. These compromises can lead to challenges during scale-up, extensive upstream and downstream process development, and ultimately increased costs and longer timelines.
The challenge is clear: accelerate clone screening while maintaining the rigorous quality standards required for clinical success.
In response to this industry-wide challenge, ProBioGen has developed a unique platform solution that transforms clone selection into a predictive, insight-driven workflow—enabling faster cell line development while maintaining the highest quality standards.
By integrating automation, data workflows, and advanced analytics, ProBioGen has moved clone selection beyond a manual, risk-prone process to a streamlined, highly scalable, and data-informed approach. This shift strengthens early decision-making and lays the foundation for faster development of high-quality biologics.
Protein-based biologics—including antibodies, biosimilars, and biobetters—are complex therapeutics produced in large bioreactors from carefully selected clonal cell lines. The choice of producer clone impacts both productivity and critical quality attributes (CQAs), which in turn determine a drug’s potency, safety, and likelihood of clinical success. Advancing a drug to first-in-human studies requires both unwavering confidence in product quality and fast, efficient development.
ProBioGen’s PsiBot smart automation solution is a unique platform that accelerates development by delivering early insights into productivity and quality, enabling confident selection of lead clones, sooner.
Built around a Biomek i7 robotic system, PsiBot streamlines clone screening and expansion—from 384-well plates to deep-well fed-batch processes—supported by incubators and analytics. A self-optimizing liquid handling algorithm maximizes speed and efficiency, supporting automated passaging, fed-batch processes, and high-throughput analytics.
What distinguishes PsiBot from other automation systems in cell line development is its custom-design and broad analytical capabilities.
When scientists at ProBioGen designed the system, the core objective was to generate reliable and reproducible data from very small sample volumes, specifically optimized for fed-batch processes in deep-well plates. This capability is critical for establishing a robust fed-batch in deepwell plates. With PsiBot, the seed train is now based on true cell counts, and all relevant upstream process parameters—such as cell count, titer, and metabolites—can be measured precisely and consistently.
Developing this analytical foundation was the most challenging step. It enabled the creation of a highly predictive scale-down model in 96-deepwell plates that closely reflects large-scale bioreactor processes. Importantly, the productivity ranking of clones is identical whether they are evaluated in deepwell plates or in larger bioreactors.
PsiBot also has a huge impact on product quality. The system allows parallel screening of up to 192 clones, making it possible to identify clones with superior quality attributes much earlier. Typical CQAs analyzed include heterodimer rates for bispecific formats, intact mass, charge profiles, and glycans.
A key question during development was whether this automated approach truly outperforms manual workflows. In practice, the PsiBot consistently delivers clones with higher productivity and much better product quality. Beyond ensuring USP platform fit, the PsiBot process is also predictive for product quality, and that’s exactly what makes it so valuable – it enables confident lead clone selection at an earlier stage.
Overall, the automated workflow accelerates timelines by four weeks and ensures seamless and highly efficient process development and manufacturing by advancing only the most promising clones.
This isn’t just automation—it’s strategic acceleration, engineered for confidence and precision.
PsiBot was developed through extensive iterative engineering and scientific refinement, with the goal of making clone selection more predictable, reproducible, and efficient. During validation, it was rigorously compared to manual workflows and consistently outperformed them in speed, data quality, and reproducibility.
Today, the platform is fully integrated into ProBioGen’s CLD workflow, where it supports client programs across a wide range of molecule types.
“What PsiBot gives us is early clarity and confidence. We can make decisions weeks sooner, screen clones faster, and generate insights using only a fraction of the sample volume required by traditional approaches. It has completely streamlined our clone selection process and accelerated every CLD program we run.”
- Dr. Thomas Rose | Head of Expression Systems | ProBioGen
These insights reflect the platform’s impact, and one recent project offers a clear example of how PsiBot enables confident, data-driven decisions in any CLD program.
PsiBot reimagines what’s possible when it comes to clone screening. Far more than just an automation system, it is a strategic engine for next generation bioproduction. By combining robotics, data science, and deep biological insight, it has transformed clone selection from a time-consuming challenge into a fast, reliable, and insight-driven process.
The impact is clear—superior producer clones earlier, backed by robust data that reduces uncertainty later in development.
Whether the goal is advancing to first-in-human or accelerating development of a complex molecule with unique quality demands, this smart automation solution gives development teams what they need sooner—better data, earlier clarity, and a smoother path toward scale-up.
With PsiBot, ProBioGen continues to advance the science of cell line development—helping our clients bring potent, high-quality therapies to patients faster, safer, and with greater confidence.