The SLAS2025 International Conference and Exhibition, one of the annual conferences of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS), will be held at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California, from January 25 to 29.  SLAS is a professional society whose members include researchers as well as developers and providers of lab automation technology.  The conference hosts nearly 7,000 attendees. This year, it will include 650 speakers, eight educational tracks and over 400 exhibitors.

To learn more about the conference, IBO spoke with Lesley Granberg, Ph.D., SLAS’ Scientific Director. She previously served as Associate Director, Cellular Pharmacology, at the Center for the Development of Therapeutics at the Broad Institute. Previously, she was a principal scientist at the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research-Oncology. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

IBO: New to SLAS2025 is the NexusXp, which is described as “collaborative integration scenario showcases to demonstrate how a lab can integrate various technology providers’ automation solutions to work in unison through the four pillars of the Design – Make – Test – Analyze [DMTA] cycle.” How does this differ from how a company would typically showcase their products at an SLAS conference (such as in their booth, in a Solutions Spotlight Theater presentation or in an exhibitor tutorial)?

Dr. Granberg: It is quite different in the sense that it is a focus on really understanding how vendors are working together. The nature of what we’re trying to do is solve problems that involve integration. We thought the best way to showcase this was through these more interactive “integration scenario showcases.” We have four of them. One is around Design, one is around Make, one is around Test, and one is around Analyze.

The difference with what we’re trying to do here versus in a booth, [is that, in a booth,] a client or a customer is showcasing their product but doesn’t necessarily show how the product integrates with other products or other solutions. Some do. There are definitely some booths and some vendors that show.

But what this really is a heightened focus on those collaborations. We want to show how people are able to come together to integrate their hardware and their software, their hardware and their hardware, and their software and their software—whatever permutations—and to really look at how they’re working together and how the products are working together.

IBO: Will there be a hands-on aspect?

Dr. Granberg: Not for this first year. Right now, they are demonstrative, backlit panels that are like large schematic poster boards, with an auto-loop video as well.

We did think about the on-deck experience of having the instrumentation coordinated and augmented and set up together. But the physicality of that, of bringing in the instruments, we’re actually working toward it. This is the annual launch, so I don’t know that we’re quite there with wanting to physically bring in the equipment.  It’s more of a showcase to demonstrate this integrative collaborative process.

If you go online and you look at NexusXp, you can actually see the four showcases that are being shown. The example that I shared is one of our showcases. This showcase invokes a collaborative experiment from Waters Corporation that is using their liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry system to really understand how to work with all the data. Versidian processes all the data. They’re getting a lot of their analytics, hits and modalities from their target validation from another company called DeepCure. The robotics are from Biosero. [The companies] are working in tandem to get all of this coordinated. That’s a huge undertaking when you think about it.

We want to highlight that, and we really thought that what was happening on the floor wasn’t as focused at understanding this process of integration that has become very prevalent within our field. In order to get these large-scale and even small-scale automation systems up and running, you need interfaces to be able to talk to each other. This is our foray into being able to try to help people understand that this “integrative orchestrated process” of automation integration is possible.

IBO: What a great idea. Talking to companies, they seem to struggle with this.

Dr. Granberg: It really came as an inspiration from our partner team, SB Expos & Events. I’ve worked very closely with their CEO, Jen Kerhin. She and I took this head-on all year in trying to invoke not only the paradigm of what we were trying to do, but how we were executing it and how we were reaching out to vendors.

The other amazing part is I had a lot of help from a content curator, Sam Michael, at NIH and NCATS. He’s actually now taken a new position at GlaxoSmithKline [GSK]. But he was their Chief Information Officer, in charge of all data informatics and automation. He was one of my trainers when I was at NIH. So I tapped back in, and I said, “Sam, would you be willing to work [on this]?” There’s an article from SLAS talking all about NexusXp and Sam’s contributions, along with the contributions of his colleague and Deputy Director at NCATS, Carleen Klumpp-Thomas.

He actually came up with the DMTA idea for how to structure this. He didn’t necessarily want to be able to say “integration” just in general; we wanted to theme it somehow. He started seeing a lot of requests for automating the chemistry process and integrating chemistry starting to come into play, in addition to what we do with biologics and cellular systems. He really started to work on a program. I don’t know what the future holds for GSK, but at NIH, they were really trying to automate chemistry quite a bit.

The idea was that this DMTA cycle is really fundamental for chemical synthesis and compound design and testing. So, he thought, “Well, why don’t we apply that to this this pavilion and try to organize it around this logical concept, so that we’re not just getting ‘this integration story’ and ‘that integration story,’ and try to theme it somehow?”

IBO: The conference has expanded its omics track to include spatial omics encompassing spatial transcriptomics, spatial metabolomics, spatial proteomics and spatial genomics; imaging mass spectrometry; and single-cell spatial profiling. Various omics topics have been a focus at past conferences, but are any of the fields listed above entirely new to the conference presentation topics?

Dr. Granberg: Spatial omics is actually a new track this year. We, in tandem with our Knowledge Content Delivery Council (KCDC), which is essentially our content governing body for SLAS, found that there were some knowledge gaps, if you will, in this field in our content portfolio for our conference. When KCDC met last year with the SLAS committee members, one of the topics that came out was, are we showcasing everything that’s going on with automation in spatial transcriptomics?

For those people who might not know what spatial transcriptomics means; in lieu of taking a homogenized sample in a test tube and grinding up the tissue or the cells and looking at the omic profile, this actually keeps the context of the tissue. If you’re looking at a tumor, say, and a tumor is usually somewhat round, a little amorphous, the idea is that you could look at the expression of different genes in the context of the tumor and where the genes are “on” and “off.” Some go “on,” on the outside. Some go “on,” on the inside. Some are only certain cell types. You really take the spatial aspect of the origin of how something looks in the body, and you are able to do the genetic and genomic analysis of it without removing that aspect.

Just like omics, spatial omics has a lot of different techniques for the actual ability to use the processes for automation. What we want to do is make sure that we’re educating people that, in translation, spatial omics can be automated too. A lot of these processes, right now, where you work with tissues and slides and you’re doing manual work, can be augmented by using automation to speed them up.

Actually, one of the forefront researchers in spatial omics was a trainee of mine, Karol Balderrama, who’s now at the Broad Institute. She worked with me at Novartis. She’s in Evan Macosko’s lab at the Broad Institute, and he works in this field. Karol has now implemented what she learned at Novartis with automation, and she’s bringing it into spatial transcriptomics at the Broad. She worked in more traditional pipelines with cells, but now she’s starting to really bring this into her work with Evan and with Fei Chen [, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology]. The Macosko lab is a fundamental spatial transcriptomics lab.

What we’re hoping is to bridge that gap between the basic science and the translatable automated science.

IBO: It sounds like she’s having to adapt the traditional automation approach to this new field. Is it correct to say that?

Dr. Granberg: We’re definitely at the level of educating those who’ve worked with histology. Histology systems are coming along quite nicely with automation to be able to stain and section tissue. Traditionally, they use antibodies, they stain a slice of tissue and they look at one marker at a time. For instance, for breast cancer, you say, “Are you BRCA1 positive? Do you have that gene that’s associated with breast cancer?” You slice the tissue, you put it on the slide and you stain it with an antibody.

Now, it’s, “What about 16 other genes that affect breast cancer? Let’s go even further. So, instead of doing all that staining individually, let’s do the entire genome and keep it in the context of the tissue.” We are getting there with systems from Leica Biosystems, a company that makes a lot of the histology equipment that does these stains, and that has really started to look at how they can help and augment their systems to be more automatable.

IBO: AI presentations, exhibitors and education appear to be important parts of SLAS2025. How is SLAS2025 incorporating information on the latest development in AI and its use with lab automation into its SLAS2025 programming?

Dr. Granberg: We do have a traditional track aimed at being able to essentially showcase the podium talks. Our poster presenters can delineate whether their posters are within the field of data science and AI as a topic when they register and they submit their posters.

Another avenue that we have is a topical interest group, one of our many topical interest groups, that is geared toward data science and AI. They are meeting on Tuesday, January 28, from 1 pm to 2 pm. This topical interest group is in line with diving deeper into data science and AI.

SLAS is also trying to figure out how do we carry this information outside of the annual conference. We are working on a new strategic plan. We’re working on a new education mission, an education plan, moving forward for the next few years. We are doing some strategic planning this year, and these strategic plans are really going to look at how do we better integrate, outside of the conference, data science and AI into our content streams beyond the traditional podium track.

NexusXp, you’ll find, is really an epicenter of data science and AI, because everything that we’re talking about that involves the integration of the data is all orchestrated through moving the data, right? It comes full circle back to the first question in the sense that I think you’ll find a lot of the themes that involve the fields of data science, machine learning, generative AI and large language models, all of these topics are part and parcel to the integrative collaborative nature that is NexusXp. I think you’ll find that it’s embedded in there.

IBO: When you said trying to figure out other communication channels, would that be like SLAS journal?

The journal is definitely one, but we actually have a program coming up, one of our first that offers a classroom experience from SLAS outside of the podium, outside of the conference. We have what’s called our Applied Liquid Handling Bootcamp that we’re moving forward with right now. That’s an internal program.

What we are working on is essentially an automated liquid handling and drug discovery boot camp. We’re going to be offering it outside of the conference as one of our first classes. The idea is to see how this Board-driven initiative of the larger Workforce Accelerator has really matriculated into our first go-round of laboratory skills that involve liquid handling.

But you can imagine that if we’re successful, we have a good following and students come along with us, we’d like to build that portfolio out. We’d like to see other courses, such as those that involve data science and AI, start to be populated within a potential in-classroom experience, in addition to what we can craft online.

We really do have big plans for our education initiatives for the next few years. We feel like we’re well-positioned with how we are delivering content through the short courses during the conference. But what other avenues can we use to deliver information throughout the year that might be extensions of those programs and be offered to those that might not be able to attend the annual conference themselves?