Panasonic automates iPS cell establishment with CiRA Foundation

Panasonic Holdings is running a demonstration with the Kyoto University CiRA Foundation of technology that automates the establishment of iPS cells. Panasonic developed a device that automates the process of establishing iPS cells from patients' blood cells, and the demonstration began in April 2026. The company says it has confirmed that the device can establish iPS cells fully automatically, a step that skilled technicians have done by hand.

The device sits in a lab of the foundation's my iPS Project at Nakanoshima Qross in Osaka. The foundation will verify its usefulness and evaluate how it runs under conditions close to a cell manufacturing environment, including manufacturing rooms. Panasonic's reasoning is that regenerative medicine using patients' own cells matters for immune compatibility, and that producing therapeutic cells stably, in both quality and cost, requires a base technology.

Many companies have automated cell culture. Establishment is a different kind of step. Reprogramming efficiency is low, so only some of the treated cells become iPS cells. The right colonies have to be picked by looking at their shape and telling fully reprogrammed colonies from incomplete ones. That judgment is subjective, and borderline cases are handled differently depending on the technician. The starting blood cells also vary from patient to patient. Handing this step to a machine means writing the selection criteria in a form the machine can use.

That has a side benefit for quality. Once the criteria are explicit, the definition of a good colony becomes a candidate for a specification. The basis for each pick is recorded. Different sites and operators can select by the same rules, and a technology transfer can pass on judgments that never fit into written procedures. In autologous cell therapy, comparability is hard partly because it is unclear whether two runs were really the same process. Fixed selection criteria reduce that ambiguity.

The my iPS concept means making one patient's batch at a time and running many in parallel, the opposite of antibody manufacturing. Costs are set by facility time and labor rather than by scale, so automation pays off mainly through fewer failed batches and hours without staff standing by. Automation does not remove equipment qualification, computerized system validation, process validation or cleanroom control. Testing under conditions close to a manufacturing environment suggests the project is now working through that layer, and there is still distance between a device that works and one that runs under GMP.