Lab Automation 2000: Optimism and Growth Highlight Event.

The eleventh annual Laboratory Automation conference, organized by the Association for Laboratory Automation, took place January 22 to 26 in Palm Springs, California. The mood of the conference was one of enthusiasm and optimism. The rapid growth of the lab automation market and the numerous new products and innovative technologies has made it one of the most exciting and closely watched segments of the analytical instrument market. The number of companies attending, some only recently formed, and the number of evolving techniques discussed at the conference illustrated the growing popularity of this market.

Attendance was the highest ever for both registrants and exhibitors, with over 2300 participants and more than 100 exhibitors. Corporate sponsors included Beckman Coulter, Becton Dickinson, PerkinElmer Life Sciences and Zymark. Previously held in San Diego, the conference benefited from its new location as it provided exhibitors with more space and a more manageable layout for attendees.

Exhibitors ranged from industry heavyweights, such as PE Biosystems and Beckman Coulter, to companies that were making their first appearance, such as ReTiSoft Software and Cellomics. In contrast to past years, there were fewer clinical products and more software vendors among the exhibitors.

The conference began with the presentation of the Beckman Lecture Award to Eric Lander of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, a project to identify, describe and disseminate human genome information. In his talk, Mr. Lander stressed the importance of lab automation to the future of genomic research and emphasized that once the human genome is sequenced, "the real work" will have just begun. Among the goals of the post-sequencing work will be to understand human genetic variation, which will require the simultaneous genotyping of 100,000 SNPs without individual locus-specific amplification. Another goal is to dissect multiple genomic physiological traits. To accomplish this, the automated measurement of the physiology of whole animals must be improved. Another goal is the classification of disease states. The challenge that lab automation must meet to accomplish this is the improved measurements of RNA and protein expression and improved computational tools. The final goal discussed by Mr. Lander was the dissection of cellular pathways, which will require either massive screening to create libraries or a rapid general recipe. Despite the dramatic advances in the last decade, genomic research will continue to demand more and more of lab automation.

The plenary session also featured Arthur L. Holden, chairman and chief executive officer of the SNP Consortium, a nonprofit collaboration of pharmaceutical companies, academic research centers and the Wellcome Trust to produce a high quality, high density genome SNP map available to the public at no cost. Mr. Holden discussed the uniqueness of the collaboration and its formation as a way to share the expense of creating the map and to do it more quickly without duplicating efforts. The goal of the two-year project is to identify a minimum of 300,000 SNPs and map at least 170,000 SNPs. Currently, the Consortium has identified 55,000 SNPs. He also announced that IBM had joined the Consortium.

Announcements and product introductions are a staple of LabAutomation 2000 and this year was no different. Among the new companies debuting products at the conference were Cybio and RNAture. Cybio introduced the CyBi Screen Machine for modular high-throughput screening, which features a rotating arm. RNAture, a subsidiary of Hitachi Chemical Research Center, introduced the mRNA Express kit, its first product, for gene expression analysis.

Another major product introduction was Beckman Coulter's Biomek FX Laboratory Automation Workstation for high-throughput applications. The system features the new Biomek FX Nucleic Acid Preparation system, which allows the first ever automation of many DNA preparation functions, the new Biomek FX High-Throughput Screening Solution, which combines two liquid handling arms in one instrument, and the new Biomek FX Plate Replication System. According to Beckman Coulter, the new models embody the trends towards high density assay formats, reduced reagent consumption and workstation-based automation.

The conference in part functions as a forum for the presentation of new technologies and developments. Among the developing technologies presented at the conference were Cepheid's microDiagnostics system, which adapts advanced microstructures to microfluidics for applications in pathogen detection in foods and the environment as well as biowarfare defense, Nanogen's "make your own chip" technology, and 3D Pharmaceuticals' ThermoFluor assay technology, which measures drug-binding affinity through effects on the thermal melting transition temperature of protein-drug complexes.

The technical program consisted of talks on molecular diagnostics, high-throughput screening, genomics, software advances, standards, clinical issues, combinatory chemistry, microtechnologies, informatics, compound management, the Internet, biotechnology, bioanalytical techniques, mass spectrometry and detection. Many of the talks showcased companies' new products or addressed specific technical problems and developments. The demand for faster, less expensive, more efficient and more accurate instruments is one of the paramount concerns for companies. Microfluidics and 1536-well plates are among the most promising solutions to some of these problems and were often addressed during the small talks. Also addressed were solutions to HTS bottlenecks, the overwhelming amount of data generated by HTS and the difficulties of miniaturization.

Matt Sills of Novartis Pharmaceuticals provided a customer's views of laboratory automation, raising practical questions regarding the expense and inefficiencies of the drug development process, asking "Is high-throughput screening becoming too expensive?" With the next generation of automated systems for high-throughput screening estimated to cost $20 million and the dramatic increase in price for upgrades, cost is increasingly a concern for customers. Consequently, pharmaceutical companies and other purchasers have less tolerance for problems and will more thoroughly evaluate new technologies and conduct more stringent cost-benefit analyses. For all of its advantages, high throughput screening has also created problems including assay development delays and an inefficient translation of leads to development. In the future, he stressed, both capacity and resource levels must be improved.

Next year's Lab Automation conference is scheduled for January 27 to 31, 2001 and will again take place in Palm Springs. EuroLab Automation 2000, also organized by the Association for Laboratory Automation, is scheduled for October 24 to 27 in London.