Rockwell Automation, the world’s largest company dedicated to industrial automation and digital transformation, today announced that PBS Biotech, a leading manufacturer of single-use bioreactor systems, embedded Rockwell Automation technology into its multi-parallel bioreactor platform to accelerate cell therapy process development and support seamless scale-up to commercial manufacturing.
Advanced Therapeutic Medicinal Products (ATMP) organizations face growing pressure to accelerate process development while enabling scalability, reproducibility, and regulatory readiness. Across the industry, low-throughput, iterative workflows, manual processes, non-standardized environments and dependence on proprietary or PC-based systems slow progress, introduce variability and increase risk as therapies advance toward commercialization.
To help its customers overcome these challenges, PBS Biotech partnered with Rockwell Automation to embed standardized, globally recognized automation in its MiniPRO™ platform — a closed, automated bioreactor system with up to 24 independently controlled bioreactors that enables parallel process development. The platform uses FactoryTalk software and the Process Library to deliver integrated, real-time process control and visibility within a scalable automation environment that can seamlessly integrate into a larger PlantPAx distributed control system (DCS) used to automate an entire cell-therapy facility.
“Rockwell technologies let us provide industrial-grade control of critical process parameters, so users are generating high-quality process data in an environment that looks and feels like commercial manufacturing. That’s really advantageous because developers are able to introduce this during the product development stage and then evolve towards clinical and commercial manufacturing with history and control.”
-Sharon Harvey, director of product management and strategy, PBS Biotech
The Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI), a member-based, nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance the bioeconomy of the United States, was an early adopter of the PBS platform.
“Typically, you don’t see this control in a system as small as the MiniPRO. With our first integrated manufacturing line, our biggest challenge was getting the process control system to sequentially hand off between subsystems. Because the MiniPRO has Rockwell controls, system integration is streamlined. When we talk to the supervisory system that makes hand-offs happen, it’s very easy to get them to talk to each other. That enables us to build bigger manufacturing lines.”
-Tom Bollenbach, chief technology officer at ARMI
PBS Biotech has demonstrated that process performance on the MiniPRO is consistent with its larger-scale Vertical-Wheel bioreactors, allowing developers to generate manufacturing-relevant data as programs advance. That continuity, combined with the platform’s compatibility with widely used automation environments, supports more predictable transfer into Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) settings.
“As cell therapy programs advance, seamless tech transfers between development outputs and manufacturing requirements help reduce risk during scale-up. By introducing a widely used automation platform during process development, the MiniPRO helps teams preserve process knowledge and control as they progress toward clinical and commercial manufacturing.”
-Matt Weaver, vice president, global industry – life sciences, Rockwell Automation
Rockwell Automation, Inc., is a global leader in industrial automation and digital transformation. We connect the imaginations of people with the potential of technology to expand what is humanly possible, making the world more productive and more sustainable. Headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Rockwell Automation employs approximately 26,000 problem solvers dedicated to our customers in more than 100 countries as of fiscal year-end 2025.
PBS Biotech is a leading manufacturer of single-use bioreactor systems and provider of process development services. The Company’s proprietary Vertical-Wheel technology enables scalable, low-shear mixing for a wide range of cell therapy and cell culture applications. PBS Biotech’s vision is to become the world’s standard manufacturing platform for allogeneic cell-based therapies.
