South Korea to build AI-designed, robot-run autonomous biotech labs

South Korea is moving ahead with plans to build autonomous laboratories where AI designs experiments and robots carry them out, with no human intervention required.

The Ministry of Science and ICT held a project launch briefing Friday at Omnibus Park in Catholic University of Korea's Seoul St. Mary's Hospital to kick 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 through 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 — creating problems of low reproducibility, high costs and lengthy research timelines. That has heightened the need for autonomous laboratories that integrate AI-based experiment design, robot-driven automated testing, and standardized data collection and analysis.

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 facilities will automate, accelerate and standardize bottleneck processes in advanced biotech experiments, and will implement a "closed-loop" AI-native research environment in which AI designs experiments, robots execute them, and the results feed back into the system for further learning.

Friday's launch briefing was attended by officials from the Ministry of Science and ICT, the National Research Foundation of Korea, the K-Moonshot drug development program director, and lead researchers and their teams. The six selected research projects presented their plans. In the general-purpose category, Catholic University of Korea will build the K-Cell General-Purpose Autonomous Laboratory Platform for Advanced Biotech AI Transformation. The five specialized laboratories will cover a range of advanced biotech fields — liquid biopsy, infectious disease, gene delivery systems, enzyme engineering, and organoid-based drug efficacy evaluation.

The project goes beyond simple laboratory automation, 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. The ultimate goal is to shorten the time and cost required for drug development.

Oh Dae-hyun, the ministry's director general for future strategic technology policy, 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 links with related initiatives — including AI biotech innovation research hubs and the national biodata platform — to build an AI-driven biotech research innovation ecosystem.