Artificial Intelligence and microfluidics: LOCAI
The project is part of the 1st German-French joint call for proposals on Artificial Intelligence launched in 2020 to contribute to the cooperation between research and digital change of Artificial Intelligence in Germany and France.
Artificial intelligence and microfluidics: introduction
Project LOCAI (Cell growth in lab-on-a-chip devices controlled by Artificial Intelligence) aims to develop a self-regulated microfluidic cell culture system that controls the growth parameters by artificial intelligence in real-time based on image analysis.
Manual laboratory experiments and protocols (cell culture included) can be a time-consuming and error-prone process, with variable outcomes and data reproducibility difficulties.
Mammalian cell culture is an indispensable tool for biomedical research and drug development, as it is often used to determine the optimal drug dose.
In addition, different combinations of drugs can be tested with variable drug concentrations, but finding the optimal settings requires exhaustive search and complex settings – even in automated systems using microfluidics, this can be very difficult to achieve.
Using artificial intelligence and microfluidics could solve this problem through targeted exploration and the ability to learn the optimal drug mixtures, growth parameters, and schedules through interaction with the cell culture.
Towards full automation of in vitro cell culture: project description
In vitro, cell culture models are regularly seen as the future of clinical testing, and consequently, their main applications are in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors.
Having a robust and reproducible microfluidic cell culture system will allow the reduction of animal experiments, eliminating ethical issues.
Currently, cell culture is predominantly done manually, and even in semi-automated systems using microfluidics, the user has to observe the result and adjust the growth parameters as required. Through targeted machine learning processes, artificial intelligence could detect errors and correct them automatically as efficiently as a human.
This project reunites the expertise from project partners in France and Germany, with the MIC and the Paris Brain Institute located in France and Biothera Institute and Freiburg University in Germany.
Each project partner will contribute to the project with its specific know-how, developing a fully automated cell culture system that combines artificial intelligence and microfluidics in a trustworthy manner.
The LOCAI project helped develop the automated sampling instrument and the fraction collector for cell perfusion and cell culture.
This project has received funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the frame of the 1st German-French Joint Call for proposals on Artificial Intelligence.
Start date: 1 October 2021
End date: 30 September 2024
