S. Korea to build AI-designed, robot-run autonomous labs to speed drug development

South Korea is moving ahead with plans to build autonomous laboratories where AI designs experiments and robots carry them out — all without human intervention.

The Ministry of Science and ICT held a project launch briefing Friday at Omnibus Park in Seoul St. Mary's Hospital at the Catholic University of Korea, kicking off the "AI-Native Advanced Biotech Autonomous Laboratory Construction" project.

The project is a core infrastructure initiative supporting the government's K-Moonshot drug development acceleration mission. It aims to dramatically ease bottlenecks in biotech research and development using AI and robotics, while driving AI transformation at the laboratory level.

Advanced biotech research increasingly depends on large-scale repetitive experiments and data-driven AI training, yet many experiments still rely on manual work by researchers — leading to low reproducibility, high costs and lengthy research timelines. The need for autonomous laboratories that integrate AI-based experiment design, robot-driven automated testing, and standardized data collection and analysis has grown accordingly.

The Ministry of Science and ICT plans to invest a total of 49.5 billion won (about $32.4 million) through 2028 to build one general-purpose autonomous laboratory and five specialized ones. The initiative will automate, accelerate and standardize bottleneck processes in advanced biotech experiments, and establish a "closed-loop" AI-native research environment in which AI designs experiments, robots execute them, and results feed back into the system for further learning.

The launch briefing drew officials from the Ministry of Science and ICT, the National Research Foundation of Korea, the K-Moonshot drug development program director overseeing the acceleration mission, and principal investigators and researchers. Six selected research projects presented their plans at the event. In the general-purpose category, the Catholic University of Korea will lead the "K-Cell General-Purpose Autonomous Laboratory Platform for Advanced Biotech AI Transformation." Specialized projects will cover a range of advanced biotech fields, including liquid biopsy, infectious disease, gene delivery systems, enzyme engineering, and organoid-based drug efficacy evaluation.

The project goes beyond simple laboratory automation by combining AI-based virtual lab technology, automated experiment control systems, and data-driven experiment optimization to dramatically improve the productivity and reproducibility of biotech research. Its ultimate goal is to cut the time and cost of drug development.

Oh Dae-hyun, director general for future strategic technology policy at the Ministry of Science and ICT, said autonomous laboratories combining AI and robotics "will be a game changer that fundamentally transforms the biotech research and development paradigm." He added that the government would strategically develop AI-native autonomous laboratories as core infrastructure for the K-Moonshot drug development acceleration mission, boost drug development productivity, and strengthen ties with related initiatives — including AI biotech innovation research hubs and the national biodata platform — to build an AI-driven biotech research innovation ecosystem.