LII:Directions in Laboratory Systems: One Person's Perspective

Title: Directions in Laboratory Systems: One Person's Perspective

Author for citation: Joe Liscouski, with editorial modifications by Shawn Douglas

License for content: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Publication date: November 2021

The "laboratory of the future"

The “laboratory of the future” (LOF) makes for an interesting playground of concepts. People's view of the LOF is often colored by their commercial and research interests. Does the future mean tomorrow, next month, six years, or twenty years from now? In reality, it means all of those time spans coupled with the length of a person's tenure in the lab, and the legacy they want to leave behind.

However, with those varied time spans we’ll need flexibility and adaptability for managing data and information while also preserving access and utility for the products of lab work, and that requires organization and planning. Laboratory equipment will change and storage media and data formats will evolve. The instrumentation used to collect data and information will change, and so will the computers and software applications that manage that data and information. Every resource that has been expended in executing lab work has been to develop knowledge, information, and data (K/I/D). How are you going to meet that management challenge and retain the expected return on investment (ROI)? Answering it will be one of the hallmarks of the LOF. It will require a deliberate plan that touches on every aspect of lab work: people, equipment and systems choices, and relationships with vendors and information technology support groups. Some points reside within the lab while others require coordination with corporate groups, particularly when we address long-term storage, ease of access, and security (both physical and electronic).

During discussions of the LOF, some people focus on the technology behind the instruments and techniques used in lab work, and they will continue to impress us with their sophistication. However, the bottom line of those conversations is their ability to produce results: K/I/D.

Modern laboratory work is a merger of science and information technology. Some of the information technology is built into instruments and equipment, the remainder supports those devices or helps manage operations. That technology needs to be understood, planned, and engineered into smoothly functioning systems if labs are to function at a high level of performance.

Given all that, how do we prepare for the LOF, whatever that future turns out to be? One step is the development of “laboratory automation engineering” as a means of bringing structure and discipline to the use of informatics, robotics, and automation to lab systems.

Principles of laboratory systems engineering

The laboratory systems engineer (LSE) is someone able to understand and be conversant in both the laboratory science and IT worlds, relating them to each other to the benefit of lab operation effectiveness while guiding IT in performing their roles. A fully dedicated LSE will understand a number of important principles:

1. Knowledge, information, and data should always be protected, available, and usable.
2. Data integrity is paramount.
3. Systems and their underlying components should be supportable, meaning they are proven to meet users' needs (validated), capable of being modified without causing conflicts with results produced by previous versions, documented, upgradable (without major disruption to lab operations), and able to survive upgrades in connected systems.
4. Systems should be integrated into lab operations and not exist as isolated entities, unless there are overriding concerns.
5. Systems should be portable, meaning they are able to be relocated and installed where appropriate, and not restricted to a specific combination of hardware and/or software that can’t be duplicated.
6. There should be a smooth, reproducible (bi-directional, if appropriate), error-free (including error detection and correction) flow of results, from data generation to the point of use or need.

Abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms

K/D/I: Knowledge, data, and information

LOF: Laboratory of the future

LSE: Laboratory systems engineer

ROI: Return on investment

About the author

Initially educated as a chemist, author Joe Liscouski (joe dot liscouski at gmail dot com) is an experienced laboratory automation/computing professional with over forty years of experience in the field, including the design and development of automation systems (both custom and commercial systems), LIMS, robotics and data interchange standards. He also consults on the use of computing in laboratory work. He has held symposia on validation and presented technical material and short courses on laboratory automation and computing in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. He has worked/consulted in pharmaceutical, biotech, polymer, medical, and government laboratories. His current work centers on working with companies to establish planning programs for lab systems, developing effective support groups, and helping people with the application of automation and information technologies in research and quality control environments.