Lab of Future Congress Day 1: Nov 2019 Insights


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

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