Next Step in Automating Clinical Genomics: Addressing Liquid Handling Bottlenecks in Cancer Panels, Rare Diseases, and NIPT

The clinical laboratory for in vitro diagnostics is facing pressure these days to keep costs down whilst pressure increases to provide  high quality services for more samples.

 

Typically, clinical genomics labs resort to purchasing multiple liquid handlers or hiring and training more staff to cope with the increased testing demand. However, relying solely on resolving hardware issues with duplicate liquid handers is insufficient. More in-depth infrastructure changes are necessary, even for labs in the early stages of their automation journey.

 

Alice Tome-Fernandez, senior genomics application scientist, will be presenting multiple use cases how to address liquid handling limitations in high throughput NGS screening, taking Cancer Panels, Rare Diseases, and NIPT as examples and present potential solutions for data integrity, parallelization and easier management of increased throughput even without the need for multiple additional instruments.

 

By addressing liquid handling bottlenecks, Alice will show how to take processes off the deck of the liquid handler so it can be used for the more complex liquid handling tasks; things like incubations, sealing and thermal cycling can be automated by other devices and linked to your existing workflow. This leads to increased throughput as the liquid handler time will be focused on complicated liquid handling tasks which is often the bottleneck for large genomic workflows

 

See Automata at ASHG 2023 this November, stand number 1427.

 

Learning Objectives