"RealLab AI," a research and development AI jointly developed with Futsupa Inc., received high praise and
won the Next Generation category award at the CEATEC AWARD 2025.
October 7, 2025
ROHTO Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (Headquarters: Osaka City, Osaka Prefecture; President and Representative Director: Hidetoshi Segi) is pleased to announce that the AI agent technology it has been jointly developing with Futsupa Co., Ltd. (Headquarters: Osaka City, Osaka Prefecture; President and CEO: Hiroshi Onishi; hereinafter referred to as "Futsuper") has received the Next Generation Award at the "CEATEC AWARD 2025".
The award details will be officially announced on October 7th on the CEATEC official website and at a press conference, and the exhibition will be held at Makuhari Messe from October 14th.
Summary of the award
What is the CEATEC AWARD?
The CEATEC AWARD 2025 is awarded to exhibited products, technologies, and services that are particularly innovative and outstanding at CEATEC, a trade show that brings together cutting-edge technologies from all over Japan and the world.
This award was created to contribute to the creation and development of new value and markets, and to revitalize industries by bringing outstanding technologies to the world. It is a prestigious award with a rigorous selection process by a judging committee composed of relevant academic societies and specialized media.
(Source: https://ceatec.com/award/)
The CEATEC AWARD Next Generation category recognizes startup companies, universities, and research institutions that are developing and working towards market introduction of advanced technologies, products, services, software, applications, and business models. Entries are comprehensively evaluated based on factors such as feasibility of practical application, social contribution, technological capabilities, and market potential.
Summary of Award-Winning Technology
Title: Real Lab AI – An autonomous AI agent that drives research from exploration to lab experiments
We have jointly developed and demonstrated with Futsupa Inc. an AI research and development agent that can autonomously perform tasks ranging from experimental design and the search and analysis of specialized data to laboratory experiments using experimental robots, all through natural language dialogue, addressing the needs of real-world manufacturing research sites in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, chemicals, and food. It has the potential to significantly lower the barriers to entry in research and development, revolutionize the speed of development, and establish a new global standard originating in Japan.
The award-winning technology is recognized as a practical AI solution that will transform the very nature of research. Specifically, it includes two development themes: a healthcare research AI that revolutionizes the efficiency of target discovery, and a "Language-to-Lab" system that autonomously controls experimental robots.
Theme ①
"AI Agents Transforming Healthcare Research: Accelerating Target Discovery and Expanding Research Access"
We have developed an AI agent system that accelerates target discovery in the healthcare field. It understands researchers' intentions, automatically generates experimental designs, extracts and analyzes optimal data from public databases, and executes large-scale bioinformatics on the cloud. The generating AI integrates and manages all processes, enabling rapid and highly reproducible target discovery regardless of expertise. This technology will allow even non-experts to perform advanced data analysis, significantly expanding the scope of research applications.
Theme ②
Autonomous prescription design and experiment execution using dual-agent AI
We have developed an AI platform that integrates formulation research and experimental robots, automating the "design → plan → execute → record" process simply by researchers giving instructions in natural language. In a dual-agent configuration, the formulation search agent handles searching for necessary information from a vast raw material database and accumulating the researcher's knowledge, while the experimental control agent automatically interprets and converts complex robot control rules and equipment constraints. This allows anyone to safely operate experimental robots—previously only usable by experts—without complex operations, preventing errors and enabling highly reproducible experiments. This dramatically shortens the development cycle and expands the environment for a wider range of talent to participate in advanced research.
Future developments
This award-winning technology, as an AI agent that balances enhanced creativity and automation in research and development, is expected to have innovative applications in research and development across a wide range of industrial fields.
In collaboration with Futsper, we will promote the implementation of socially valuable technologies, not only supporting our own research but also with a view to developing it as an external sales business.
Reference information (released March 13, 2025)