Would you hire someone with out-of-date skills? You might be doing just that. We are in the midst of a transformation of the way laboratory work is done. Those changes are not going to be incremental; they will require a major change in the skills and experience people need in order to be effective. This article takes a look at what working in an automated laboratory will be like and what the needed skills are based on the experiences of those working in facilities dependent upon successful implementation of automation technologies (which include laboratory informatics).
Automation has been shown to be an effective tool in improving productivity
and reducing the cost of labor-intensive work. This has been demonstrated not only in manufacturing environments but also in clinical laboratory systems and contract testing labs where laboratory automation has been effectively implemented.
During e-mail and telephone conversations with people at contract testing labs, made in preparation for this article, the phrase “We couldn’t work profitably without automation” would come up. One lab stated that their prices would be two to three times higher without automation. The driving factor in clinical chemistry automation has been to improve productivity and reduce costs (Mt. Sinai Medical Center reported a nine fold increase in sample throughput with a fivefold per-test cost reduction.) These are the same issues that drive any organization.
Properly done, laboratory automation is a useful tool in both research and testing environments. In fact, most laboratories would find it difficult to function without automation and computer systems. While some measurements are difficult to make in an automated environment (the effect of lotions on skin, for example), most laboratory instrumentation work is done by equipment with embedded computers in addition to data acquisition/reduction/reporting and management functions.
How will lab work change?
Automation has already had an impact on laboratory work. Those working in chromatography, for example, no longer measure peak areas or heights by hand, constructing calibration curves, or evaluate results manually. That work is done by computer systems, with the results shown on printouts or transferred to other systems. In many cases, sample preparation work is done by robotic systems that relieve people from labor-intensive efforts. An autosampler was released last year that carries out sample preparation functions within a small footprint. For the most part, however, these systems represent incremental changes to lab work, with people still providing linkage—the integration— between one automated task and another. Ideally, in a fully automated laboratory workflow, the system would carry out all steps of the analysis from the initial sample to the final result. This is not fantasy. This type of work is going on in clinical chemistry and contract testing laboratories today. In clinical applications, the systems are the result of decades of work in standardization and client vendor cooperation. We see the results of standardization in life science workflows that use micro-titer plates with standardized plate formats, allowing vendors to create a range of equipment with different capabilities (stackers, washers, readers, etc.) that can be put together into functioning systems.
The increased use of automated systems does raise one concern: trusting the automated equipment too much—the development of “push-button science.” We cannot let the complexity of systems intimidate us into not asking questions about how they work and produce results. As you will see below, laboratory professionals need to be educated so that they can challenge vendors and ensure that they are using the right products for their work. The fact that a vendor has produced a software package doesn’t mean it is right for your application. End users need to understand how it works, how it is converting instrument output into results, and whether it fully fits their needs.
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