Is pandemic pressure driving automation in scientific and biomedical laboratories?

Article By: Mr. Aditya Saini, Founder & CEO, CNC PATHLAB

Covid-19 is an unexpected giant that has thrown the world into disarray with its malevolent nature. With so much distress and negativity around, the productivity of humans has hit the dirt with detrimental consequences. Among this chaos, treating people with health anomalies is a major challenge.

Scientific and biomedical laboratories are the ones that have been facing a reproducibility crisis from the functionality perspective. Due to this roadblock, there is a notable delay in bringing life-saving treatments and therapies to those who are in urgent need. Several studies have shown that medical error is another major challenge in this industry due to which patients are at high risk of contracting health anomalies. Now, persisting conditions like this is calling for lab automation. It not only enhances the productivity of health officials but addresses several challenges and improves the efficacy of their medical work.

Automation has changed how laboratories function in their clinical space. With the negative effects of pandemic, laboratories are performing a greater variety of tests with accuracy, with fewer staff and reduced cost.  Everything around us is driven by technology. Whether it is academic or industrial, the advancement of automation is developing high-value biomedical products and services that are tackling the world with ease and assisting millions to have a healthy and peaceful life.

Pandemic has caused a serious turbulence in even the strongest economies of the world. With reduced work and business in the market, it is hard to control the rate of people getting sick with unknown variants secretly attacking humankind. That’s when healthcare officials find lab automation a one-stop destination which is eliminating the intervention of manpower to handle the specimen. Also, it is reducing the chances to Covid-19 being transmitted from one person to another with faster results. Laboratory information systems are being used to calculate the results and condition of patients. Laboratory automation is allowing LIS systems

for more sophisticated testing based on the results. With fast and accurate machines, it is easy to take treatment decisions and guide patients for more effective treatment.

With time, the biomedical and scientific fields are now blending computers, robotics and other smart technologies to minimize the errors and thus providing maximum results.

On the other hand, it has been very strenuous for researchers to perform complex manual tasks whilst trying to remember settings and parameters of every gadget and instrument. If you look at the PCR amplification of DNA, it is a highly time-consuming process that requires extended time. Manually carrying out thermal cycling steps in PCR was a sensitive task, which included frequent transfer of DNA samples. To simplify this process and reduce the human work, the scientists came up with ‘Thermal Cycler’ which performs all the functions by itself in minimum time.

With the higher possibilities of humans getting infected with the Covid-19 virus, lab automation is the safest and fastest way to keep the laboratories functioning whether it includes biomedical research or finding productive treatment methods to cure infected people. Since every industry in this world is moving to the virtual working space, the circumstances are such that automation is a revolutionary step in the field of healthcare functioning in present times. Lab automation is an ultimate tool for scientific and biomedical research. With the current fast-moving trends, scientists are looking for an integrated and flexible one-stop automated platform with high productivity and faster results.