Two companies whose lab automation businesses illustrate the evolution of the lab automation market and technologies are PerkinElmer and Agilent Technologies. Formerly, laboratory automation was primarily associated with high-throughput compound screening for drug discovery. Now, laboratory automation is an integrated feature of application-based workflows in both drug discovery and development.

PerkinElmer’s Bio-discovery business includes lab automation tools such as liquid handling, as well high-content screening systems and cell-based assays, in line with the growing use of cell-based assays and phenotypic screening for drug research. At the show, the company debuted its EnSpire plate reader (see IBO 1/31/11), which has detection capabilities for both biochemical and cell-based assays.

PerkinElmer President of Bio-discovery Richard Eglen, PhD, told IBO that the company is expanding into downstream markets, such as in vivo imaging, a market it entered last year with the purchase of VisEn Medical (see IBO 8/15/10). He said the expansion is part of the Bio-discovery division’s emphasis on application-centric, rather than technology-centric, solutions, so it can provide products addressing a specific application or workflow, such as GPCR research. New areas of interest for drug development he cited included epigenetics and protein-protein interactions.

Dr. Eglen also discussed the company’s next-generation sequencing and analysis services, introduced last month. With the rapid advances in sequencing technologies and the informatics investment and expertise required for it, he said a service offering makes more sense for many researchers. He noted the advantages of PerkinElmer’s offering include the company’s bioinformatics capabilities and its historical relationship with the pharmaceutical industry.

Agilent’s direct involvement in the lab automation market is relatively recent, beginning with its 2007 purchase of Velocity11 (see IBO 11/15/07). Nitin Sood, general manager of Agilent’s Automation Solutions Division, told IBO that the Division’s 2010 sales growth can be attributed to Asia, genomics and benchtop workstations.

Automation’s integration with Agilent’s lab product lines is a focus of the Division. Mr. Sood noted that the automation of sample preparation workflows fits with Agilent’s portfolio of detection systems. Discussing the current role of lab automation in drug discovery and development, he explained that the focus on understanding disease biology requires proteomics, genomics and cell-based research and that automation products must be flexible to accommodate each field. Automation must also accommodate a new set of users, such as scientists working in target identification.