Some reflections from day 1 of Lab of the Future at Welcome Genome Campus, Cambridge Wed 13 Nov 2019.
What digital lab of the future could be & some key messages from the panels and speakers that included Bayer, Roche, AstraZeneca, GSK, Abbvie, Janssen, Leo Pharma & Benevolent AI etc
Digital is not simply making things electronic!
- Think beyond the 4 walls of your lab. Research is now distributed and orchestrated across many parties, their input needs to be included in the design.
- Digital is:
- Bringing the physical and virtual world together. Better able to model biological systems to direct new experiment
- Remaining flexible to support changing environment (collaboration, technology, culture)
- Research has significant virtual components and physical lab needs include this
- Think radically about the workflows you have. Some questions to ask:
- Can the workflows change now with changed ambition and technologies (Automation, Data value)
- Where digital will have an impact and what size the impact will have
- With all the hype of AI/ML, well annotated data remains key to success and needs to start in the lab processes and not retrospectively
- Need to assess the value of data
- Assessing Impact & Investment of Digital
- What is the contribution of the Digitalisation platform compared to current baseline investments
- Need to be aware of the differences between electronic and digital
- Knowledge is not just in scientists heads & data systems. The value is in the interaction between scientists
Looking forward to Day 2