In her work as a drug researcher, Ulrike Rieder uses some of the most sophisticated and sensitive lab equipment available. But when it’s time to collate the results, she often shuttles from machine to machine gathering information. “I have to go to each piece of equipment individually to transfer the data or access each device remotely,” says Rieder, a biologist at Philochem, a Swiss biotechnology company. “It would help if all the lab equipment were somehow connected.”
There is, as they say, an app for that—and soon there will be many, as pharmaceutical companies, lab-equipment makers, and startups seek to solve the problem. While the technology in machines such as gene sequencers, centrifuges, and bioreactors keeps advancing, individual devices rarely communicate with one another. In many labs, technicians rely on screen shots, pens, and paper to share data, an inefficient process that increases the risk of mistakes. “There’s a lot of manual typing-in,” says Dana Vanderwall, an executive at drugmaker Bristol-Myers Squibb. Researchers should be able to “focus on doing science and not on the idiosyncrasies of this or that piece of equipment or this or that data format.”
“I have to go to each piece of equipment individually to transfer the data or access each device remotely. It would help if all the lab equipment were somehow connected.” — Ulrike Rieder, a Philochem biologist
Germany’s Merck KGaA is developing software that automates experiments and predicts when machines are about to run out of chemicals or other materials, then allows one-click ordering of supplies—“the Amazon of life science,” as Merck executive Udit Batra puts it. GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and more than a dozen other companies are collaborating through the nonprofit Allotrope Foundation to develop common standards for lab data. Proponents say these could one day organize scientific results much as HTML provides a lingua franca for websites, no matter the browser used.
Efforts to smooth the research process are hampered by the large number of companies that make lab equipment. They all have their own software, and for complex experiments each machine may need separate instructions. Allotrope is developing standards intended to be device-agnostic, allowing scientists using different equipment to collaborate seamlessly. Equipment manufacturers are working on proprietary systems optimized for devices they sell. Thermo Fisher Scientific offers a web platform for uploading data and analyzing it using a suite of apps, with the ability to monitor experiments remotely from a smartphone. The goal is “driving the inefficiencies of the currently cobbled-together data analysis out of the system,” says Joe Beery, Thermo Fisher’s chief information officer. “The researchers just want the answer.”
London startup Synthace seeks to foster communication with what it dubs an operating system for lab equipment. The system, called Antha, lets scientists specify what they’re trying to study, suggests experiments, and controls lab hardware, pausing when necessary to prompt a human to, for example, insert a new plate of liquid samples. The experimental steps and data are recorded in a common format. Synthace has developed “drivers”—not unlike those a computer uses to communicate with printers—for a dozen devices from about 10 manufacturers, including Roche and PerkinElmer.
Eventually, Synthace says, use of Antha could become widespread enough that compatibility with the system will be a selling point for a device, encouraging manufacturers to create drivers themselves. The company in October announced a partnership with Merck (no relation to Merck KGaA), and it’s in negotiations with four other major pharma companies to bring Antha into their labs. Dow Chemical is using Antha to design crop chemicals. “It’s taken me about five years of associating with computer programmers to realize they’ve got much more sophisticated tools” than many scientists, says co-founder Markus Gershater, a biochemist and Synthace’s chief scientific officer. “That’s not a hardware problem—the hardware’s fantastic. It’s a software problem.”—With Doni Bloomfield
The bottom line: Equipment makers and startups are racing to streamline scientific research by enabling lab machines to communicate.
To contact the authors of this story: Matthew Campbell in London at mcampbell39@bloomberg.net, Johannes Koch in Berlin at jkoch34@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jeff Muskus at jmuskus@bloomberg.net.
©2016 Bloomberg L.P.
