“Organisations need to adapt to become more and more flexible”
General Manager, Promega Biotech India, New Delhi
Laboratories are encountering an increased demand for molecular testing and need workflow solutions that allow greater automation and higher throughput to keep up with the increasing number of samples to be prepared for downstream applications. Catering to these demands, USbased Promega Corp is offering instruments, chemistries and personalised support that simplify the process of automating sample prep in one’s lab. BioSpectrum spoke to Dr Rajnish Bharti, General Manager, Promega Biotech India, New Delhi on the future of digital R&D. Edited excerpts;
With lab automation becoming a cornerstone in the COVID-19 scenario, are you planning to launch more automated solutions for the life sciences industry?
A modular automated liquid handling and purification system developed by Promega Corporation for its Maxwell nucleic acid preparation offers labs newfound flexibility compared to large all-in-one instruments. Our team of automation experts are available to help you design an optimized high-throughput solution that meets your laboratory’s needs. We have implemented Maxwell HT (high-throughput) chemistries on a variety of instrumentation platforms working with a broad range of sample types. Promega recently launched its benchtop capillary electrophoresis instrument, the Spectrum Compact CE system, developed in collaboration with Hitachi High-Tech.
What are your views on the future role of automation in biological research in India?
Labs carrying out essential research and diagnostics for COVID-19 quickly leveraged the power of automation to increase capacity. On the clinical lab side, we saw a tremendous need to scale up rapidly with automation solutions. Some labs who did not yet have automation wanted to immediately scale up to several liquid handling systems to process thousands of samples per day where before they only processed a hundred samples per day. Even if the automation is already in place, the question is how can we better enable the remote design of experiments, remote execution, and remote monitoring of what is happening in the lab? Organisations need to adapt to become more and more flexible. We need to collaborate in a new way using digital tools, in and out of the lab.
How do you plan to enhance digital interaction with scientists? What are the challenges?
Promega is focusing on increasing customer interaction from the past few years. However, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have totally transformed ourselves into digital and each day we are exploring new ways to increase digital interactions with customers. We are reaching out to customers at e-conferences through our virtual trade show booth. Currently we are also doing some upgrades in our customer relationship management (CRM) system to capture customer information in more efficient ways. Our CRM system is linked with flow of information from the Promega website, social media accounts and webinar tools. This is helping us to reach the scientific community and make them aware of the latest updates. We have started a significant website upgrade project that delivers improved performance, increased personalisation, improved shopping and transaction experience, and new ways to interact with our customers.
The pace with which researchers adopted digital formats for conferences, lectures and meetings revealed that currently available tools can substitute many of the physical interactions in the workplace. It also showed that academics are willing to use digital tools for scientific exchange. However, we are also observing that digital interaction formats struggle to reproduce in-person social interactions such as informal discussions. They also raise new concerns on data security and can induce higher stress levels due to the blurring of the boundaries between work and private spaces. We expect hybrid formats to emerge which combine digital and physical interaction formats, and an increase in digital interactions between geographically distant working groups.