Wednesday, July 17, 2024

Mastering Automation Integration: Ensuring Success Beyond the Equipment in Your Lab

Automation will have an impact on every part of your laboratory, not just the instrumentation attached to automation. To ensure successful implementation and long-term use, lab managers need to:

1.    Identify a cross-section of staff to help make decisions on things like:

• How samples will be transported to the automation line
• Who will be assigned to monitor the automation for alarms and resolve issues
• Establish paths of movement for efficiency and removal of redundant movements
• Transportation of non-connected/offline testing samples to bench locations
• Handling of add-on testing
• Discarding of expired samples

2.    Host a planning event with selected staff to give a voice to bench techs, lab assistants, and others who will be using the automated equipment.

3.    Once the processes and decisions have been made, the next step is training. Choose staff to become automation subject matter experts to spread knowledge and troubleshoot any issues. 

Join this presentation to learn more actionable advice on how to implement each of these steps, how to prevent overlooking the small but important details, and discover other tips for a smooth transition into automation.

Presenter: Michael Sommers
Roche
11:00 am-12:00 pm EDT

Reducing Time to Science: How Accessible, Touchscreen-enabled Automation Makes NGS Library Preparation Plug and Play

Automating NGS library prep is a critical part of optimizing workflows in genomics labs. As the cost and efficiency of sequencing has improved, the process of library preparation has largely failed to improve in parallel, largely due to the significant hands-on time and complexity involved in the process. Automation offers a compelling solution to this challenge, but there are still barriers with creating and verifying automated protocols, and making the day-to-day running of protocols accessible to all lab personnel. 

In this webinar, the experts will present using a benchtop liquid handler, the Opentrons Flex, to fully automate the process quickly and easily. By reducing setup to a handful of simple touchscreen selections, NGS automation setup and day-to-day runs are quick and easy, and variations in library preparation between scientists can be eliminated. 

The speakers will demonstrate the process of finding and configuring your protocol in the Opentrons Protocol Library and setting up the robot for a run, including touchscreen-guided automated calibration and changing run-specific parameters. They will present data from verified protocols for automated library prep for a variety of different NGS techniques, including whole-genome sequencing, targeted sequencing, long-read sequencing, and multiplexed plasmid sequencing.

Presenters: Kinnari Watson, PhD and Frances Slater, PhD
Opentrons
12:30-1:30 pm EDT

Thursday, July 18, 2024

Next in Lab Automation Software: Flexible Scheduling & Workflow Creation—The Quickest Path to Outcomes in R&D

The life sciences industry is moving beyond automating single workflows on a single set of devices. It is now aiming for automation across entire laboratories and sites. 

This vision of a fully orchestrated lab requires a platform that can handle the complexity and scale of the entire lab ecosystem. The scheduling software needs to optimize across multiple devices throughout the lab. Data flows need to cover the end-to-end lifecycle of workflows. Responses to errors or human intervention need to be more robust than ever. 

Future VS Now: 

Discover how a hybrid approach combining the best of static and dynamic scheduling, along with a simple yet powerful workflow builder, can significantly enhance iteration speed in R&D labs. 

João Pereira, Product Manager at Automata, will delve into the differences between different lab automation schedulers and will introduce a new hybrid approach—dynamic replanning scheduler, which merges known constraints for effective workflow planning and resource allocation with state-of-the-art solving algorithms to keep workflow delivery on track. 

Learn how this innovative approach enables batch parallelization, real-time error handling, dynamic rerouting, and deadlock prevention to streamline processes, improve data quality, and accelerate your research outcomes with cutting-edge automation solutions. 

Ultimately, deploying a scalable, smart, and self-optimizing lab environment will significantly accelerate the discovery and development of life-saving therapies.

Presenter: João Bessa Pereira
Automata
11:00 am-12:00 pm EDT