The Lab Man is often asked “what is the next big thing in laboratory automation?”.  Like most people with good executive training, I reply “what do you think?”.  Of course, that’s not the answer they want, but the truth is that I really don’t know the answer to such a specific question.  I will tell people that most of the advances in lab automation come as the result of technology or innovation from outside the formal laboratory market because there is much more money driving those other markets.  Someone inside the laboratory market recognizes the potential lab use of that innovation or technology and puts it to use.  Robotic systems had been in industrial use for almost two decades before they entered the laboratory domain, when advances in microprocessors and small servo motors brought robotic technology to a scale, cost and flexibility suitable for laboratory uses.  Some of the current approaches for doing nanoliter and picoliter scale laboratory liquid dispensing have their roots in the inkjet printing industry, and were first adapted to lab use by those working on Human Genome Project automation in the mid 90’s.  Sometimes existing laboratory approaches get “reborn” via an infusion of new technology.  Pumped fluidic systems had been used for serialized chemical assays for 40 years before people began to meld that approach with micro-scale fabrication technology developed in the semiconductor industry to create microfluidic assay systems. 

So what other technological adaptations might be lurking out there?  What old approaches, like fluidic flow analysis, might be rejuvenated by new technology?  Well, perhaps an example might be the use of calorimetry for high-throughput screening of drug compounds.  When I first read about this idea in a related blog, my thoughts went back to my last experience with calorimetry – undergraduate Physical Chemistry.  The process of making those measurements was so cumbersome and painful that I couldn’t imagine how it could have evolved to a point of being anything close to high-throughput!  But technology does evolve and thus old techniques get reborn to a new paradigm.  A recent paper in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery describes “Adding calorimetric data to decision making in lead discovery: a hot tip”.  And another paper in Nature touts “High-throughput biochemistry heats up - A calorimetric microarray provides a platform for high-throughput thermodynamic measurements for proteomics and drug screening.”  Hard to believe! 

The idea is that drug binding is all about energy, and that bound molecules with the lowest energies relative to starting state represent more stable and tighter binding and that these will make the best drugs with the least side effects. Apparently this has been a topic of quite some discussion within the medicinal chemistry community for some time – a realm that Lab Man does not dare to enter!    

And there are indeed fully automated, microplate format compatible calorimetric devices available now.  One of the manufacturers of such devices will be exhibiting at LabAutomation 2011.  Whether automatically processing one microplate of samples per day is “high throughput” is open to debate, but it’s certainly beats my undergraduate experience!  And we all know by now not to get too hung up on sheer throughput.  It’s the relevance of the data produced that really matters – ask and answer good scientific questions. 

So, stay tuned to this topic to see if it turns into the “next big thing”!  

Oh, yes - one more thing.  I wish to thank the SLAS marketing team for giving The LabMan a new, blue shirt!  The old red one was getting a bit ripe after several years! 

Until next time,

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto