4237 registrants, 425 exhibit booths - including 45 new exhibitors and 25 products launches, excellent plenary talks by Klavs Jensen and John Abele, and of course live interviews with The LabMan for the Poster Award and New Product Award winners!  LabAutomation 2009 was very sunny in many ways, especially considering the tough economic times.  The event felt as vibrant and crowded as ever, and it didn't hurt that the weather was fabulous.  Despite the great vintage rock and roll at the Sunday evening poolside mixer, we proved that laboratory automaters don't dance!  Would Styx (Mr. Roboto) do the trick?  Probably not.

Klavs Jensen from MIT opened the event by updating everyone on his many projects focused on microfluidic chemistry and biology.  It would seem that after many fits and starts, laboratory scale continuous flow synthetic chemistry is gaining acceptance.  The flowing environment creates some unique kinetic environments that cannot be achieved in batch synthesis, which can be a great advantage in some cases.  Plus the conditions are highly controllable and reproducible and easily scaled to larger process chemistry levels.  John Abele, co-founder of Boston Scientific, reminded us that continuous flow lab automation systems date back to the 1950's, as he recalled his time working with Jack Whitehead at Technicon on their innovative Autoanalyzer, and he reminded us how important science and technology education is today as he talked about his current role as Chairman of FIRST (see past Blog).

The exhibition floor was buzzing again this year.  The 425 exhibit booths were always busy, including the eight companies enjoying their debut in Innovation AveNEW.  The LabMan was thrilled to see a robotic arm among the New Product Awardees this year!  Winners were:

• Agilent Technologies for their Direct Drive Robot -  a 4-axis robot (articulated arm on a vertical mast) designed solely for laboratory automation

• Mettler Toledo for their Quantos Automated Dosing system - a powder dispensing system built inside an analytical balance for repeated, automated dispensing of small quantities (0.5mg) of powders

• Genefluidics for their Proteus Robotic System - a fully integrated cartesian robot system for DNA and RNA sample prep and analysis (via an integrated electrochemical sensor)

The Agilent win is somewhat "back to the future" for those of us who remember the HP (now Agilent) ORCA robot, which was also designed from the ground up for the laboratory environment, and was later sold to SAGIAN before they were acquired by Beckman.  In any case, it's good to see them back in the game. 

The microtechnologies world was not ignored!  The ALA strongly supports student participation in the conference, funding the travel of over 40 graduate students to present their work.  This years poster award winner was Vinu Venkatraman, Portland State University for his poster on Iridium Oxide Nanomonitors for Real-Time Health Monitoring Systems.  It's worth noting that Vinu did this work under the guidance of Shalini Prasad, a former ALA student grantee and now an assistant professor at Arizona State University (recently moving from Portland State).  It's also worth noting that this years conference chair, Scott Martin, now an assistant professor at Saint Louis University, is also a former ALA student grantee.  It's excellent to see participants in this long-standing ALA program doing well and staying involved in the organization.  

Still on the microtechnology front, the $10,000 ALA Innovation Award was granted to Hyongsok (Tom) Soh, Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, for his podium presentation, High Performance Magnetic Separation in Microfluidic Channels.  The ten finalists for this award are invited to present their work at ACHEMA 2009 in Frankfurt, Germany, with their travel expenses paid by ALA and DECHEMA.

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto!

The few talks The LabMan had time to sit through were quite interesting and well attended - even the last talk of Wednesday morning before the end of the conference.  That's always a sign of robust attendance and interest. 

Lets do it again next year!  Perhaps someone will dance?

Until next time,