Objective

Traditional robotic scheduling had its genesis in Drug Discovery, where the need to screen millions of compounds in parallel was no longer practical using people and traditional instrumentation. This led to the development of highly specialised high throughput screening automation systems. Systems were often customised and unique to the requirements of the assay, and challenging to adapt and modify for different workflows or new assays. The introduction of modular automation concepts and instrument agnostic, flexible scheduling software enabled businesses to have more flexible infrastructure, adapting robotic automation platform quickly and easily to meet new business requirements. In a laboratory 4.0 context, we need to look beyond simple modularity and configurability, and explore how advances in web technologies can enable adoption of automation in new areas. This talk will explore through a number of practical example how web technologies can facilitate the industrialisation of laboratory process, from compound management and drug discovery, to sample preparation in pharmaceutical quality assurance to emerging needs for automation at scale in biobanking and bioprocessing