Multiply Labs is doing for cell therapy labs what has already happened in the chip industry: It’s introducing robots to do the tedious, precision and hygienic work better, faster and cheaper.
The startup concept was sparked when Fred Parietti was at MIT doing PhD research in robotics and he met with Alice Melocchi, who showed him how these laborious labs lacked automation while risking contamination.
“She showed me what she did in a lab and how difficult it was, and I couldn’t believe it — I thought drugs were made like chips, and this was insane but also real,” said Parietti, co-founder and CEO of Multiply Labs. “Next, I flew to Silicon Valley, and we started this at YCombinator.”
San Francisco-based Multiply Labs , founded in 2016, today is automating cell therapy manufacturing with robots for leading companies, including Kyverna Therapeutics and Legend Biotech.
VIDEO
Multiply Labs offers end-to-end robotic systems that produce gene modified cell therapies at scale.
Similar to how the semiconductor industry has evolved from clean rooms with technicians in bunny suits, Multiple Labs is ushering in this new era for biosciences. Like with chips today, it promises precision gains, reduced contamination and advanced manufacturing with physical AI .
Multiply Labs systems are bringing these therapeutics into the future using NVIDIA Omniverse libraries for developing digital twins of these lab environments and the NVIDIA Isaac Sim robotics simulation framework for training robots on the bespoke skills required to develop these treatments. It’s also developing humanoid robots using the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T humanoid foundation robot model for assisting in the labs with improved hygiene.
Cell therapies are new and involve taking cells from a patient or donor and modifying them for treating patients to fight diseases or a patient’s own immune response. They show promise for treating cancers, genetic disorders, autoimmune diseases and neurological conditions.
These artisanal treatments — one-offs for specific patients — are expensive to produce and can easily be destroyed in the process by contamination or improper handling. Robots within the controlled biomanufacturing clusters of Multiply Labs help ensure more hygienic and precision processes.
“It needs to be sterile, and you don’t want anyone breathing anywhere near the cells, so it was an obvious high value application of robotics,” said Parietti.
Simulating Cell Therapy Manufacturing Skills for Improved Precision in Labs
Cell therapy manufacturing is complex, costly, and prone to failure. Bioscience companies are turning to automation and simulation to reduce risk, scale output and preserve expert knowledge. A key development is imitation learning — training robots in Isaac Sim to replicate expert tasks by analyzing video demonstrations. This approach captures the tacit, often undocumented skills of top scientists and translates them into robotic control policies.