Accelerated drug development with AI | ZEISS Digital Innovation

Business context

The pharmaceutical industry is rapidly adopting advanced cell culture models to improve drug development success rates, yet manual processes continue to limit scalability and reproducibility. These labor-intensive workflows introduce variability and slow down experimental timelines. As development costs increase, pharma companies are under pressure to modernize their cell culture operations with robust, automated solutions that can deliver consistent, high-quality data at scale to inform decision-making.

Project overview

That was exactly our client’s mission¹ – to unlock the potential of advanced cell culture models in drug development by enabling scalable and reproducible cell culture processes. They wanted to bridge the gap between cutting-edge biology and industrialized workflows, transforming cell culture from a craft into a reliable, high-throughput process. By doing so, the client aimed to empower research teams to run more experiments in less time, with greater confidence in the comparability and quality of their results.

The primary goal was to develop a platform that fully automates cell culture processes, including incubation, liquid handling, imaging, and sample handling. This meant seamlessly integrating hardware, software, and analytics into a single, intuitive solution that could operate continuously with minimal human intervention.

Our approach

We set-up a cross-functional team that engaged in a collaborative and highly agile setup with the client and various stakeholders across multiple workstreams:

We provided strategic consultancy on system and software architecture as the guiding directions for the implementation phase.
Our team developed and deployed the advanced connectivity and integration solutions that seamlessly interfaced with critical software components, including the machine-learning core and hardware orchestration application.
Furthermore, we delivered business consulting services focused on future scalability, Return on Investment (ROI), and comprehensive business case development for the overall solution.

The solution

The overall automated platform was developed based on existing standalone devices, which were integrated via robotics & software.

Our team developed a workflow management and orchestration solution that enables the user to interact with the platform and perform end-to-end automated cell culture processes.

The software provides efficient process and data handling to dynamically control complex cell culture protocols.

Explore the solution overview in the graphic below:

Device & Machines

Devices: Robotic Handler, Microscope, Inucbator,...

Connectivity: Ethernet, USB, serial connections, Fieldbus

Connectivtiy Platform^*

Process Engine, ML Analysis, API integrations, Image Transfer from devices, Data Storage

^{* For hardware-integration we supported with the solution for efficient device testing and stabilization}

Graphical User Interface

REST, System Status, Error Handling

Scheduling & Optimization

Data Storage, Queuing, File Based Communication

Our services

Software product ownership & project management
Requirements analysis and specification
Design & implementation of software architecture
UI Design
Identity & access management
Backend implementation for process control
Frontend implementation for user interaction
API Implementation
Continuous deployment
Market access and business support
Documentation

Technical environment

Spring
Spring Boot
Spring MVC
Spring Integration
Docker
Azure
Azure DevOps
REST

Team roles

Lead Commercial Workstream
Software Project Manager
Software Product Owner
Requirements Engineer
Software Architect
Software Developer
Software Tester
Security Engineer

Results

Through agile development and a highly collaborative working mode, the project team was able to create a first version of the platform’s software architecture in short time.

The platform demonstrated the feasibility of automating cell culture workflows, generated technical insights, as well as a deep understanding of its scalability and reproducibility potential.

Starting with a rather abstract set of features, the ZEISS Digital Innovation team helped us to distill out and realize a concrete set of software requirements in short time, ultimately leading to a solution, that brought our hardware installation to life.

The software team enriched our project, by contributing with their solid experience from previous development projects, while staying open to new working modes.

Innovation Manager Client's Internal Venturing Unit
In our dynamic project, I experienced ZDI as an open and trustworthy partner.

Facing high uncertainties and changing requirements, the team delivered a rock-solid software that now steers the culture process and gives us confidence to take the leap to develop a commercializable product.

ML Specialist Client's Internal Venturing Unit