Diagnostics
Time management
It’s been decades since developers realised workfl ows dominated by hours of repetitive pipetting were market opportunities for pipetting robots, but automation has not impacted all clinical laboratories equally. Now, as even complex, heterogeneous microbiology begins to reap the
benefi ts, Isabel Ellis asks Felix Lenk, head of the SmartLab systems research group at TU Dresden, and Nate Ledeboer, medical director for clinical microbiology and molecular diagnostics at the Medical College of Wisconsin, how ‘total’ automation might reinvent laboratory medicine.
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elix Lenk, the head of the SmartLab systems research group at TU Dresden, makes clinical laboratories sound like anxiety dreams. On crossing the threshold into one, he’s transported back to the early 1990s, to a world “where everything was put on paper”. All around him, spectacularly overqualified technicians squeeze pipettes, prepare samples and funnel data between impassive machines. It seems there’s no end to the drudgery. “You press a button on a machine and it does some small step in a large process, and then you even write down the result before taking the sample to the next device,” he winces. “Everything is very manual, very traditional and very limited.” Then everyone goes home, and nothing happens at all.
Coming from an automation engineer, Lenk’s reaction is more allergic than most. “If I see a process being done more than once,” he admits, “I think about automation.” But his aversion to inefficiency doesn’t mean he’s overstating the issue. In clinical microbiology, traditionally one of the hardest disciplines to automate because of the diversity of specimens, materials and containers it handles, technicians spend more of their time (32% according to one Clinics in Laboratory Medicine paper) devoted to manual tasks like plate streaking and broth medium inoculation than any other activity, while a further 10% of their working hours are taken up by simply transferring samples from one place to another.
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