Strange title, eh?  This is a verbal meld of some select, interesting topics that are going to be presented at the upcoming SLAS2012 Conference.  These just happen to be topics of interest to me, but you should know there will be over 130 presentations on various topics.  The full preliminary program is available on the SLAS website, so go find topics of interest to you. 

First up is a dramatically titled session: Bridging the Valley of Death; How Can Academia and Pharma Best Work Together?  This will be a panel discussion moderated by Derek Lowe, the well-known author of the In the Pipeline blog.  The Lab Man welcomes a fellow blogger!  Perhaps we’ll do an interview?  Anyway, they will be discussing and debating the role of academia in drug discovery, and “Bridging the Valley of Death” refers to the not-always-successful interaction of academia and industry.  Both parties have interests in similar scientific problems, but their goals are different.  Fundamentally pharma wants to move ahead as fast as possible on identifying and developing marketable drugs.  Academia gets rewarded for publishing and doing intellectually novel and interesting work, and of course securing grant money.  The two goals don’t always play well together, but in an era of concern technical competition from around the world, can we afford not to find better ways for these two parties to leverage each other?

If you have opinions or questions, please attend this session on Monday morning, February 6. And look for a detailed article on the subject in an upcoming SLAS ELN. 

Moving away from a strict pharma focus, there is a talk on Tuesday afternoon from Kim Hanyoup of Sandia National Labs on the topic of Digital Microfluidics for Automated Library Preparation of Next Generation Sequencing.  Here we have the intersection of two interesting topics.  Digital Microfluidics is all about generating discrete liquid micro droplets and doing complex biochemical processes on the contents of those nanoliter droplets.  There are various techniques for generating these micro droplets, but the fascinating thing to The Lab Man is that although quite different in scale, the concept of doing biochemical manipulations on discrete fluid packets goes way back to the Technicon Autoanalyzer, which I hesitate to say I worked with in my early industry days.    The second interesting topic in this talk is the need for better and more automated modes of sample prep prior to doing high throughput sequencing.  To date, much of that work has been done via existing automated liquid handling workstation technology, but that has always felt like yesterday’s solution to today’s problem, so lots of work is being focused on that realm.  Eventually, I suspect we’ll see much more of that sample prep incorporated directly into the sequencing analysis or sequencing techniques developed that require less sample prep, but that is tomorrow, not today.  

Back to drug discovery, High-Throughput Technologies track co-chair Jonathan Lee of Eli Lilly has invited several speakers to talk about the practice of Phenotypic Drug Screening.  For those not familiar with this approach, it’s another “back to the future” paradigm.  In the pre-molecular biology era, potential drug compounds were evaluated by putting them into complex biological systems (i.e., mice) and noting the effect.  As we learned more about molecular biology and the human genome, much focus shifted toward target-based drug discovery – examining the effect of a potential drug compound on specific disease mechanisms that we now understood much better (but well enough?).  Now the “old” approach is making a comeback, but with a new set of analysis tools in the form of cell-based assays and the title of Phenotypic Screening.  Controversial – of course!  Those attendees who get your blood boiling in the Academic/Industry session can come to these talks with your blood pressure already elevated, ready to throw some of the rock-hard rolls served at breakfast! 

Finally, let’s not forget the informatics and hardware geeks, which The Lab Man must admit to having an affinity toward.  Leading off the Informatics session on the last afternoon (yes, you must stay for the ENTIRE three days!), we have a presentation by Ross King of Aberstwyth University.  Come for no other reason than to hear that Welch name pronounced!  Dr. King’s group there has been working on the Robot Scientist project, the melding of laboratory robotics, artificial intelligence and microbiological discovery knowledge to create a fully closed loop scientific discovery engine.  The system called “Adam” has been reported to be the first to design, perform and interpret scientific experiments leading to a new discovery. 

So, there you have a just a taste of the varied topics to be presented at SLAS2012.  Come join us for the rest!

Until SLAS2012,

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto