Goldfuß Engineering has developed a new system in which a hygienic “Motoman HD7” handling robot from Yaskawa fills up to 120 vials per hour under cleanroom conditions. Clinical studies or personalized medicine usually require small batches of medication, for example injection solutions, which are filled into vials. These vials or glass containers must be sterile and aseptic. The small batch sizes make filling on conventional systems uneconomical. Thomas Goldfuß, Managing Director of Goldfuß Engineering, is convinced that automation is now also becoming interesting for smaller laboratories for two reasons: the first air principle in the new version of EU GMP Annex 1: it requires that all products must be continuously surrounded by clean, filtered air during an aseptic process. And the shortage of skilled workers.

Automated containment cell for research and small batches

Goldfuß Engineering specializes in customer-specific laboratory automation in cleanroom environments. Together with containment expert Weiss Pharmatechnik, the company from Balingen in southern Germany has developed a robot-assisted filling system for small batch sizes. This enables small batches of up to 120 vials per hour to be automatically filled and sealed in a class B laboratory. However, the cell can also be flexibly adapted to other processes such as cell cultivation, R&D automation or product and water analysis.

At the heart of the system is a safety cabinet from Weiss and a "Motoman HD7" industrial robot specially designed for the hygiene and cleanroom sector. Goldfuß Engineering has developed a multifunctional gripper with three sides especially for this robot: With this, the handling robot picks up the individual parts of the vials, brings them to the filling station, closes the filled vials and then transfers them to a magazine. As an option, the robot and the functional units can also be integrated into a Weiss isolator.

Handling robot for simple operation and programming

Goldfuß Engineering has been working with Yaskawa robots for 16 years now. “The features of the 'Motoman HD7' are perfectly matched to our solution. For this application, the robot must meet the requirements of cleanroom class A (ISO 5) and the corresponding certificates are important for the validation of the system according to GMP. It is also crucial that the surfaces can be cleaned with all common media, and sterilization with UV light or H2O2 fumigation is possible,” says Thomas Goldfuß. "The experience of Goldfuß Engineering with Yaskawa robots made integration and programming very easy. We opted for the Yaskawa model 'Motoman HD7' because operation and programming are intuitively simple. With the support of Yaskawa we also had very good experience, for example with regard to training, rental equipment and tests.”