Orchestrating your Discoveries Beyond the Integrated Workstation

Meeting today’s demands to accelerate the pace of scientific discoveries and get life-enhancing products to the market sooner, a critical need for increasing process efficiency and digital connectivity within the laboratory has arisen. A solution beyond the integrated workstation is vital to this need.

This talk will focus on solutions for orchestrating the flow of physical and digital materials across entire end-to-end laboratory workflows. A solution that goes beyond the integrated workstation must control processes while capturing and contextualizing data at every point along the laboratory automation continuum. And foundationally, the solution relies on digitalizing and harmonizing all aspects of the scientific process. We will explore strategies for digitalizing manual tasks, governing stand-alone instruments, and controlling fully automated workstations, all while integrating new and legacy data systems every step of the way.

Automating EMD Serono’s Drug Discovery Pipeline
The Bioassay Automation and Compound Logistics (BAA&CL) department provides automation and screening technologies to support the advancement of all NCE and NBE discovery projects. Leveraging BAA&CL’s expertise in robotics, we work across the Billerica campus to modernize our practices and adopt automation. Laboratory robotic automation allows scientists to save time during assay development, train new personnel faster, free up resources for data analysis and streamline assay transfer initiatives (internal and external). In a discovery setting, laboratories also need flexible robotic solutions to ensure that automation meets the business needs of the laboratory.
BAA&CL is implementing flexible automated robotic platforms utilizing Green Button Go’s scheduling software to combine automated liquid-handling robots with integrated instrumentation to achieve walk away assay support. The most overlooked benefit to these systems is that they are built in a generic modular manner so that code and best practices can be shared across all platforms. To ensure easy adoption, flexible graphical user interfaces enable the systems to process many different assay-specific parameters in a user-friendly manner. This reduces operator intervention by utilizing scheduling functionality available within Green Button Go to control integrated peripheral devices.