Exciting recent advances in automation tools, including ubiquitous wireless connectivity and the internet of things, are allowing us to engineer biology more easily than ever before. These technologies are making our tools more autonomous and allowing them to better communicate with each other in order to complete protocols and accomplish experiments as designed. In this session, moderated by Ron Leuty of the San Francisco Business Times, we will be hearing from the cloud lab providers, the automatic liquid handler manufacturers, and other companies working to seamlessly connect these tools together. Join us for one of the most exciting topics of the conference!

For some of these companies, the focus is on improving the quality and reproducibility of the science being done.

BioBright are developing a smart lab - a unified user interface, control system and sensor network that enhances the scientific workflow and enables researchers to compare what should have happened with what actually happened in an experiment. With government funding and many clients across the industry lined up, Charles Fracchia will be explaining how BioBright are enhancing the human workflow in the lab to turn biomedical scientists into superheroes.

Riffyn is a cloud software that supports the full design and learning cycle inherent to scientific discovery, guiding R&D professionals toward higher data quality and clearer decisions, and improving experimental reproducibility - something, Tim Gardner will argue, that can shave years off the time required to develop synbio technologies to commercial scale.Tim Fell from Synthace will discuss the company’s programing language for biology - Antha - a system at the heart of a recently announced collaboration with Dow Agrosciences to develop improved microbial fermentation strains for the production of crop protection products. By breaking biological workflows up into individually testable and reusable elements, Antha means experiments can be rapidly designed, tested and scaled.

For other companies it’s about providing access to cutting edge automation, either in house through affordable, open-source automation solutions, or through fully automated cloud labs. In both cases the idea is to make sure life science can be done faster, more cheaply and more reproducibly than ever though possible.

Will Canine will discuss how OpenTrons is bringing the digital fabrication workflow from hardware design such as 3D printers and laser-cutters to the wet lab, and helping to decentralize and distribute lab automation. Following a successful kickstarter campaign and having recently completed its first production run, OpenTrons units are now found globally in over 35 labs, each of which can help develop and make available new protocols for this open source platform.

Transcriptic’s meticulously optimized, technology-enabled remote lab uses state-of-the-art automation and control technology combined with a service that emphasises user experience and usability. With backing from the Y-Combinator startup accelerator, Transcriptic is driving the acceptance of cloud lab technology, and pushing molecular biology to new levels of reliability and reproducibility. In her talk Marie Lee will be highlighting recent developments, including the faster, fully enclosed second generation workcell, and some of the cloning capabilities.

Emerald Cloud Lab (ECL) production facility, ECL-1 (Photo: Business Wire)Emerald Cloud Lab (ECL) comes from the venture backed biotech Emerald Therapeutics, where it was originally set up to streamline research efforts, ensure reproducibility, and provide greater leverage for Emerald's scientists. As such it has already run over 500,000 samples through its system, and is now being opened up to the wider scientific community.

And for these “lab in cloud” services to be deployed effectively, scientists will need to bridge the gap between human and robotic speak, a topic Ian Hanegraaff from Analytik Jena will be addressing. The company stands poised to become a market leader in automated research tools, as it combines some of the industry’s most advanced robotics with cutting edge chemistries for faster PCR and nucleic acid purification.