automation

Guest:

Pete Kissinger, Chemist, Purdue University
Bio and Contact Info

Listen (4:43) Many problems in life science traced back to poor measurements

Listen (2:50) Innovation without quality

Listen (4:37) Metabolome closer to reality than genome

Listen (7:46) Too focused on questions of reimbursement and regulation

Listen (3:34) Smartphone bio sample collection not there yet

Listen (10:35) Does the new Emerald Cloud Lab have a future?

Pete Kissinger is one of those who can discuss just about any area in the life sciences, often with humor. Pete's a professor of analytical chemistry at Purdue and founder of a drug development company, Bioanalytical Systems.

When I first chatted with Pete, our discussion went to every corner of the industry and back again. If Pete were a football player, he'd be comfortable in any position from quarterback to front linesman to safety.
For today's show, Pete and I tried to stick to a common theme--the importance of quality measurements.

Pete ties many of the problems we have in the life sciences--issues of reproducibility, failed clinical trials, an over emphasis on genomics--to low quality measurements. When asked why that is, Pete turns to funding, arguing that we are prioritizing the new over the reproducible.

"Often there isn't the funding to validate sufficient numbers of samples . . . We fund innovative academic science. We don't fund the routine blocking and tackling required to get quality data from a sufficient number of subjects," he says in today's interview.

At the end, I ask Pete what he thinks about the new Emerald Cloud Lab, a remote lab offering basic biology experiments accessible to anyone through the cloud. Will this impact the integrity of the scientific method?

But often we get off track. Pete is too fun a guest not to loosen the reins a bit.

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Guest: Brian Frezza, Co-Founder, Co-CEO, Emerald Therapeutics

Chapters: (Advance the marker)

0:50 What is the Emerald Cloud Lab?

4:16 Does this impact the scientific method?

10:00 Pulling the labor, not the scientist out

14:20 Much more data detail

19:52 A chance to improve reproducibility

24:06 The tools are slowing us down

We knew it was coming. Everything else has been going that direction--that virtual realm that offers humanity such hope, affectionately referred to as The Cloud.

Brian Frezza is a young entrepreneur quite fresh out of grad school. Brian and his co-founder, D.J. Kleinbaum, went to Carnegie Mellon and Stanford. They liked to think about the big picture when they were in school. What could we do, what product, what company could we work on that would drastically--not just incrementally--change the world of drug and diagnostic discovery? they'd ask themselves.

Four years into their commercial adventure, they've released what they think will make that big change--to use the popular term, be a disruption.

"The Emerald Cloud Lab--think of it as a remote laboratory that you're controlling via the internet, as if you were standing in front of the instruments themselves when you run your experiments," says Brian at the outset of today's interview.

Brian carries on with a cool evenness, but this is quite a mouthful. What? A scientist can have access to a full laboratory to run one of about forty experiments without having to invest in the equipment, space, and labor?

Brian says the biggest challenge to putting a lab in the cloud, no doubt, was in coding the language for the automation. This is automation on a scale we've never seen before.

Presenting The Emerald Cloud Lab.

Editor's note to our audience: As a scientist what is your view of this? Is this the best thing ever, or is it too giant a step? Does this degrade the scientific method or better enable it? Please give your feedback in the comment section below.

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