Digital Transformation of the Laboratory

A Practical Guide to the Connected Lab

Klemen Zupancic, Tea Pavlek, Jana Erjavec, Klemen Zupancic, Tea Pavlek, Jana Erjavec

• Publisher: Wiley-VCH
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783527825066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Analytic Chemistry

Take your lab into the 21st century with this insightful and exciting new resource

Digital Transformation of the Laboratory: A Practical Guide to the Connected Lab delivers essential and transformative new insights into current and future technologies and strategies for the digitization of laboratories. Thoroughly supported and backed-up with contributions from thought and industry leaders, the book shows scientists in academia and industry how to move from paper to digital in their own labs.

The distinguished editors have included resources from industry-leading voices in their respective fields that offer concrete and practical strategies to embrace modern, digital technology. You'll learn to modernize your laboratory, cut costs, improve productivity, and find efficiencies you never considered.

You'll discover a stepwise approach to move from paper to digital tech, including guidance on how to understand and define your lab's requirements and evaluate potential solutions. Real-world case studies are included throughout the book to provide specific examples of how the ideas presented in the book can be applied in real life. You'll also benefit from the inclusion of:

• A thorough introduction to the evolution of the modern laboratory, including new available technologies and the new science being conducted with it
• An exploration of crucial terms you'll need to understand in order to chart your path into the future of the laboratory
• Examinations of practical issues you'll need to master in order to define your lab's digitalization strategy
• Numerous case studies and expert commentary on the subject of moving from paper to digital

Perfect for senior executives, lab managers, senior scientists, principal investigators, professors and PhDs working in the field of biotechnology, pharma, chemistry, healthcare, life science, Digital Transformation of the Laboratory: A Practical Guide to the Connected Lab will also earn a place in the libraries of laboratory heads and auditing departments seeking to find efficiencies, cut costs, and maximize productivity in their own labs.

Part I
Inspiration

We start this book with an inspiring overview of lab evolution, new technologies, and new science being done. It will give you a complete overview of the subject of laboratories of the future and, hopefully, add to the vision and purpose of your own career in science and technology.

1
The Next Big Developments – The Lab of the Future

Richard Shuteand Nick Lynch

Curlew Research, Woburn Sands, UK

1.1 Introduction

Steve Jobs once said that “the biggest innovations of the 21st century will be at the intersection of biology and technology”; in this (r)evolution, the lab will most definitely play a key role.

When speculating on the future digital transformation of the life sciences R&D, one must consider how the whole lab environment and the science that goes on in that lab will inevitably evolve and change [1, 2]. It is unlikely that an R&D lab in 2030, and certainly in 2040, will look and feel like a comparable lab from 2020. So, what are the likely new big technologies and processes and ways of working that will make that lab of the future (LotF) so different? This section endeavors to introduce some of the new developments in technology and in science that we think will change and influence the life science lab environment over the upcoming decade.

1.2 Discussion

Before going into the new technology and science in detail, it is important to recognize that this lab evolution will be driven not just by new technologies and new science. In our view, there are four additional broader, yet fundamental and complementary attributes that influence how a lab environment changes over time. They are:

1. People and culture considerations
2. Process developments and optimization
3. Data management improvements
4. Lab environment and design

When we add the fifth major driver of change – new technology (including new science) – it becomes clear that digital transformation is a complex, multivariate concept (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Complex, multivariate concept of lab transformation.

In this section, we discuss how each of these high‐level attributes will influence the changing lab and the expectations of the users. For all five areas, we include what we think are some of the most important aspects, which we believe will have the most impact on the “LotF.”

1.2.1 People/Culture

The LotF and the people who work in it will undoubtedly be operating in an R&D world where there is an even greater emphasis on global working and cross‐organization collaboration. Modern science is also becoming more social [3], and the most productive and successful researchers will be familiar with the substance and the methods of each other's work so breaking down even more the barriers to collaboration. These collaborative approaches will foster and encourage individuals' capacity to adopt new research methods as they become available; we saw this with the fast uptake of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR) technology [4]. “Open science” [5] will grow evermore important to drive scientific discovery. This will be enabled through the increased use of new cryptographic Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) [6], which will massively reduce the risk of IP being compromised [7]. The LotF will also enable more open, productive, collaborative working through vastly improved communication technology (5G moving to 6G) [8]. The people working in these labs will have a much more open attitude, culture, and mindset, given the influence of technology such as smartphones on their personal lives.

Robotics and automation will be ubiquitous, but with more automated assistance, the density of people in the lab will likely drop, allowing scientists to focus on key aspects and complex parts of the experiments. As a consequence, issues around safety and “lone working” will grow, and a focus on the interaction points which scientists have with automation will develop to ensure they are properly protected. For the few remaining lab technicians, not only will safe working become of increased importance, but the need for organizations to deliver a better “user experience” (UX) in their labs will become key to help them both attract the smaller numbers of more expert technicians and also retain them. The lab technician's UX will be massively boosted by many of the new technologies already starting to appear in the more future‐looking labs, e.g. voice recognition, augmented reality (AR), immersive lab experience, a more intelligent lab environment, and others (see later sections).

1.2.2 Process

The lab processes, or “how” science gets done in the LotF, will be dominated by robotics and automation. But there will be another strong driver which will force lab processes and mindsets to be different in 5–10 years time: sustainability. Experiments will have to be designed to minimize the excessive use of “noxious” materials (e.g. chemical and biological) throughout the process and in the cleanup once the experiment is complete. Similarly, the use of “bad‐for‐the‐planet” plastics (e.g. 96/384/1536‐well plates) will diminish. New processes and techniques will have to be conceived to circumvent what are standard ways of working in the lab of 2020. In support of the sustainability driver, miniaturization of lab processes will grow hugely in importance, especially in research, diagnostic, and testing labs. The current so‐called lab on a chip movement has many examples of process miniaturization [9]. Laboratories and plants that are focused on manufacturing will continue to work at scale, but the ongoing search for more environmentally conscious methods will continue, including climate‐friendly solvents, reagents, and the use of catalysts will grow evermore important [10]. There will also be a greater focus on better plant design. For example, 3D printing [11] could allow for localization of manufacturing processes near to the point of usage.

In the previous paragraph, we refer to “research, diagnostic, and testing labs” and to manufacturing “plant.” We believe there is a fundamental difference between what we are calling hypothesis‐ and protocol‐driven labs, and this is an important consideration when thinking about the LotF. The former are seen in pure research/discovery and academia. The experiments being undertaken in these labs may be the first of their kind and will evolve as the hypothesis evolves. Such labs will embrace high throughput and miniaturization. Protocol‐driven labs, where pure research is not the main focus, include facilities such as manufacturing, diagnostic, analytical, or gene‐testing labs. These tend to have a lower throughput, though their levels of productivity are growing as automation and higher quality processes enable ever higher throughput. In these labs, reproducibility combined with robust reliability is key. Examples in this latter area include the genomic screening and testing labs [12, 13], which have been growing massively in the past few years. For these labs the already high levels of automation will continue to grow.

Figure 1.2 Virtual and real design‐make‐test‐analyze (DMTA) concept.

In the hypothesis‐driven lab [14] with the strong driver of sustainability combined with the growth of ever...