Ask Linda: Using Collaborative Automation to Screen Faster

Dear Linda,

Our lab is responsible for screening new product ideas. The good news is that we have a lot of new ideas to work on. However, we just can’t seem to test enough of them fast enough. We’re under tremendous pressure to find more winners, more quickly from the business. How can we screen more efficiently, cover a wider experimental space, and find more potential new products faster?

Thanks,

Marcus

Dear Marcus,

What a great problem to have! Using automation technology and software tools to screen faster in a wider space and produce better development decisions is easy compared to having to produce more and better creative product ideas to test. By implementing high throughput experimentation (HTE), you’ll be able to run far more experiments than your lab can complete using traditional methods. Some of the keys to implementing an effective HTE process are miniaturizing experiments, running them in parallel, identifying proxy tests that can be completed very quickly, and building efficient interfaces with software and data libraries to generate FAIR (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) data. These HTE processes have been implemented in biological, pharma, and chemical labs with good success. One of the key learnings from these other HTE labs is the importance of good collaboration between the scientists designing the experiments, the hardware vendors supplying the parallel experiment hardware, and the software vendors. Getting everything to work together in a seamless fashion is one of the keys to implement HTE.

Good luck!

Linda