How we’re helping our life sciences client with laboratory automation for compound management and streamlined workflow.

Company Summary  

 

Our client is a life sciences technology company in San Diego, CA with 28 years of experience discovering and developing drug treatments. We began our partnership with this client in 2019.

 

As is becoming a more common practice in the biotech world, the client was utilizing a robot to help automate manual tasks such as liquid handling an integral part of the early drug testing process. Other operational elements subject to automation included scheduling drug test experiments and managing the inventory and upkeep of laboratory supplies.

 

While laboratory automation and laboratory automation software represented an important upgrade for our client, they wanted to add another important innovation feature.

 

They needed the ability to control these robots remotely, from anywhere in the world. This would reduce day-to-day upkeep, in turn decreasing manual overhead and the need for laboratory staff to be physically present to operate the devices, allowing for more focused time in innovation and discovery.

 

This is where we came in. The client wanted us to develop a web app that could seamlessly integrate with their integrated laboratory automation solutions and control them remotely.

 

 

Services

Web development

Technologies

.NET core, Angular

Project Locations

Cairo, Egypt

Industry

Life Sciences, Drug Discovery

Size

$750 Million

Customer Since

2019

 

Our Client’s Integrated Laboratory Automation Solutions

Reports estimate that it takes a pharmaceutical company up to a decade and $2.6B to bring one drug to market from initial discovery to regulatory approval. Companies are continually looking for breakthrough efficiencies in workflows and operations to save time and money in the process of introducing life-saving drugs to market.

In recent years, robotics and artificial intelligence have emerged as strategic ways to further automate and optimize the drug trial workflows.  

In keeping with these trends, our client over the last few years has incorporated laboratory automation solutions and informatics into its compound management process.

The ultimate purpose is to increase speed and quality while reducing the manual processes required to bring life-saving drugs to market faster and more cost-effectively.

The Challenges of Laboratory Automation 

Our client’s decision to automate its laboratory infrastructure was a notable one but also provided several logistical challenges. Laboratory automation requires a considerable amount of manual intervention and preparation.

How could the client implement a “hands-off system” that seamlessly integrates with their lab information management system (LIMS) and strikes a balance between increased throughput and reduction in manual overhead?

To accomplish this vision, we had to work with the client to convert business requirements into technical requirements and address the following technical and operational challenges.

 Leveraging Stock Robotic Software for Improved Compound Management

 

The robots acquired by our client required a laboratory staff member to always be onsite to initiate any new liquid handling jobs or modify any existing ones. In addition, the original controller application was “buggy” and had a lot of latency.

 

This resulted in significant performance issues that required our client to be in frequent contact with the machine vendor. Along with the challenges with the performance of the app, the stock app didn’t provide all the customization features that our client required to make the most of its newly automated environment and laboratory automation solutions.

 

 Programming Challenges in Laboratory Automation

 

The laboratory automation and informatics setup that our client envisioned entailed a number of technical challenges. We needed to migrate from a stock application that controlled one system onsite to developing a dynamic app that controlled multiple systems remotely.

 

This required us to overcome several logistical issues, such as how to drive parallel robotic systems and how to sync the scheduling of each system to provide optimal reporting, not to mention the various troubleshooting challenges. For example, the original vendor software had some bugs that we reported and required fixes.

Compound Management: Reporting & Analytics

 

The client also wanted to represent the robots’ usage data as a heat map. This feature wasn’t available in the original application, so this required our team to innovate and develop an entirely new UI and UX from scratch.

Our Laboratory Automation Solutions 

Taking an existing system and customizing it is often more challenging than building a solution from the ground up. This was no less the case for our client. Leveraging a sophisticated laboratory automation software for drug trials and modifying it to very precise specifications presented a number of technical challenges.

However, at the end of the day, our team overcame these hurdles and successfully translated our client’s complex business requirements into practical outcomes that exceeded their expectations.

Here are the major solutions we delivered:

Remote Laboratory Automation and LIMS Integration

The core outcome of this project is that we built a remote application with a sophisticated user interface that enables our client’s scientists to conduct drug trial tests and experiments from anywhere in the world.

The system is scalable so that it can onboard as many robots as necessary. It also syncs automatically so that whenever a project is added to the machine in-person, it will appear on the app. The major operational enhancements we instituted fell under three categories:

·       Automatic liquid handling to cherry pick compounds and aliquot them into tubes for storage. 

·       Automatic sealing, storage, and retrieval of drug trial plates and compounds. 

·       Scheduling of experiments updates and status alerts to scientists.

 

 

More Robust Reporting with a Lab Automation Management System

By adopting the original vendor’s API, our team was able to seamlessly integrate our remote app with our client’s lab information management system (LIMS) to allow full tracking and updates of their plates and compounds. We also included a robust reporting feature that tracks all projects and monitors performance, catching issues before they spiral out of control. Because of our database integration, we were able to provide the client with rich new insights and metrics on key elements of their workflow.

Complex Features for Compound Management 

Our remote application solution was built with the latest modern technologies to provide our client with the best features of compound management, enabling scientists to run and monitor their experiments remotely. This included hosting reagents and compounds for testing and storage, retrieval of compounds and containers, and sending those components for downstream testing.

The front end was developed using the Angular framework while the API Gateway was built using the .NET core stack. Some of the major functionalities that we built include: 

·       Ability of the remote app to sync whenever humans intervene manually with the robot.  

·       Calendaring function that easily allows scheduling of jobs and for future processing, helping with workflow planning and management. 

·       Reporting functions including the number of compounds used, depiction of total machine usage times in a heat map-like matrix, along with other key metrics, such as user information. 

Outcome