Lab of the Future is now

Customer Voices

LabTwin for Drug Discovery at a Top 10 Pharma Company

Guru Singh
Guru Singh September 23, 2020

An Associate Principal Scientist in the Discovery Sciences group at a Top 10 Pharma Company recently started using LabTwin and shared his experience. The scientist is responsible for crafting bioreagents for drug discovery, including transcription factors, ion channels, GPCRs, proteases and kinases. He shared his thoughts on how LabTwin’s voice-activated digital lab assistant helps him manage his data.


The Challenge: Collating Data From Many Different Sources

My work creating proteins involves complex protocols and many different machines. Experimental conditions must be exact to produce functional proteins. To ensure experimental stringency, I must collect data about DNA quality, transformation, incubating cells, cell lysates and purified proteins. At every step I must prevent contamination. This makes documentation with traditional methods very difficult.

Before using LabTwin, I would take my computer into the lab and put it in a clean space to use without gloves. If I couldn’t remove my gloves to take notes, I would make notes on a paper protocol document, tissues, scrap paper or even my gloves. I found that these documentation methods were not very consistent and I could easily miss important details.

After I finished an experiment, I had to transfer all my notes into an electronic lab notebook (ELN) and also often into powerpoint. This was time-consuming.


The Solution: Mobile, Hands-Free Data Management

I decided to try LabTwin’s voice-powered digital lab assistant because I wanted to improve my write-up process. The most tedious points of my research involve compiling data from different places. I liked the idea of having all my notes in one place.

“LabTwin is a very easy way of capturing notes in the lab.”
Associate Principal Scientist, Top 10 Pharma Company

With LabTwin’s digital assistant, I don’t need to take off my gloves to make notes. I can now record what I see, annotate all results by voice and also add voice annotations to pictures. I can use my voice notes for troubleshooting after experiments and to explain my observations. It also means other people can easily continue or repeat my work. When handing over to another person, the small details help them to make the experiment a success.

“LabTwin is useful to capture information, particularly when things don't go exactly as planned and I need to make small adjustments to the protocol, for example change protein concentration.”
Associate Principal Scientist, Top 10 Pharma Company

LabTwin is especially helpful for wet-lab work and pipetting. It also helps to include more annotated pictures in documentation – this is good for quick referencing.


Benefits of Voice-Activated Data Management

Before using LabTwin, I could spend up to one day a week analyzing and reporting data. With LabTwin, I capture more notes than I used to. I'm convinced that my documentation is better and more reproducible. For example, I now note which type of stirring I am doing as well as the conditions (there are 10 types of stirring). I can also note details like whether a solution is sticky or cloudy.


Conclusion

Voice-powered digital lab assistants allow easy and complete documentation at the bench. This translates into fewer errors, easier troubleshooting and more reproducible results.

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