Topic: Medical technology: is the future self-driving laboratories?
IDTechEx has identified three core technology pillars that are required for the advent of self-driving laboratories, including laboratory informatics, materials informatics, and robotics.
Self-driving laboratories, whereby a lab automatically chooses what experiments to do, robotically carries this out, tracks the reaction with integrated sensors, acquires and analyses the results, and then decides what experiment to do next, may be far from being achieved, however, IDTechEx has highlighted how technological innovations that can drive their creation are already here.
IDTechEx has released a detailed report about materials informatics, detailing the key technologies, players, applications, and market outlook.
Laboratory informatics
The role of laboratory informatics and robotics can take numerous forms, including well known high-throughput experimentation through to full digital platforms and integrated sensors to monitor experiments.
These developments are having an immediate impact on the reproducibility, capacity to internally share, safety, and rate of generating experimental data.
Materials informatics (or cheminformatics or bioinformatics as appropriate) plays a key role in each stage of the experimental cycle. From candidate screening and retrosynthetic predictions through to structure-property relations and further analysis, the impact this can have on a closed-loop laboratory process is evident.
Work from the Harvard University, University of Toronto, and the University of Glasgow are some of the key institutes in this field, with Kebotix and DeepMatter Group being exciting spinouts commercialising these developments.
Topic Discussed: Medical technology: is the future self-driving laboratories?
