Robots and AI just got hired to help invent tomorrow's medicines

Danaher, a life-sciences company, plans to switch on its first AI-powered autonomous research lab early in 2027. The lab will combine artificial intelligence and robotics in one connected workflow to dream up, build, and test custom antibodies and other molecular tools — feeding every result back into the model to sharpen the next design. The company says the lab could make discovering new molecules eight times faster and produce ten times as many target-binding molecules each year. The point, says its chief science officer, is to free scientists for the complex challenges where human insight matters most.