LAB VISION – TREND RADAR FOR THE LABORATORY INDUSTRY

Themed Tours of Roche's Laboratory World

On Monday afternoon, participants were able to get a glimpse into Roche’s laboratory world as well as the history and buildings of the Basel site. In small groups, they visited the modern pRED Center and the Innovation Lab, among other places, and learned all about Switzerland’s tallest building.

"Digital Transformation" Industry Exhibition

At the "Digital Transformation" exhibition, around 20 manufacturers from Germany and Switzerland presented their latest equipment and ideas for the smart lab. From virtual reality in automated laboratory reactors to fully automated pipetting and electronic lab notebooks, numerous digital innovations made their way to Basel.

Industry Get-Together

Dr. Stephan Sigrist kicked off the event with his keynote address, “What Will the Laboratory of 2030 Look Like, and What Added Value Has Digitalization Brought?”, in which he presented the laboratory of the future and its potential for businesses.

At the festive get-together dinner that followed, the SPECTARIS LaborBär Award was presented to Anna-Yaroslava Bodnar and Alexander Csaba Baumgarten. With their self-developed model for creating semiquantitative metal ion indicators, the young researchers found a way to describe the interaction between the dye and the metal ion at the molecular level, thereby providing evidence of metal contamination in the environment. With this award, SPECTARIS supports the promotion of young talent as part of “Jugend forscht,” Europe’s largest youth competition in the fields of science and technology.

Keynote: Roche's Journey Through the Digital Lab

According to a 2021 study by Aspentech, the digital culture in biopharma companies is underdeveloped, and Deloitte also reported in 2021 that the majority of executives in the pharmaceutical industry believe their companies need to invest more in digital technologies to be successful.

Is our industry really that behind the times? Dr. Simon Bunger, CEO of Labfoward, used examples from our daily digital lives to illustrate how our everyday lab routines could change quite rapidly, and offered a glimpse into a not-so-distant future in which labs are fully connected and new ways of working are supported by digital tools and automation.

Tom Kissling, Head of E2E Lab Services at Roche, then provided an overview of Roche’s state-of-the-art technologies and how they are used in the research environment to make it as user-friendly and efficient as possible.

Interactive Workshops

• Democratizing Laboratory Automation
  Keynote: Roche
  Discussion: Do we need new approaches to make laboratory automation more accessible?
• The Standardization Landscape in the Laboratory Industry: Providers and Outlook
  Keynote: SPECTARIS, SiLA, LADS, and UIKB
  A joint review of various standardization approaches, followed by a discussion on the need for standards and their importance for the laboratory of the future.
• Experience LADS live
  Keynote: Dr. Matthias Arnold, LADS Technical Lead
  Following a brief theoretical introduction, participants will work together to implement a use case on a LADS-compatible device—live and hands-on.
• The Digital Laboratory – Current Status and Prospects for Manufacturers and Users
  Keynote: Dr. Kirsten Siebertz, TDCLAB Dr. Siebertz
  Based on the survey results from the market study “Digitalization in the Laboratory,” this session will explore which prospects are particularly relevant and interesting for manufacturers, and which market- and future-oriented products and services are necessary for the digital laboratory.
• How can smart buildings benefit laboratory technology?
  The buildings of the future are so intelligent that all building information is stored in a digital twin. How could laboratory technology benefit from this information?

Communication 1.0 - Back to the Beginning

Insight: Severin von Hoensbroech
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In the end, it’s the impact that counts—we can support that technically, digitally, and in other ways, but we can’t hide behind anything but ourselves. This is especially true for leaders. But how do I create the impact I’d like to see? How can impact be measured? Is impact a technical process? Severin von Hoensbroech, who also trains top politicians, demonstrated in his presentation just how much we’re already communicating before we even realize we’re communicating.

If you want to communicate effectively, you need to understand the basic mechanisms of communication. So, let's start from the beginning.

Sabine Porn, a journalist, gave a tour of Lab.Vision

Before Sabine Porn joined the BMW Foundation in 2014, she was best known in her hometown of Berlin as the host of Info-Radio on Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, where she reported on current political events. Her passion, however, is looking beyond her own horizons: For seven years, Sabine Porn worked as a producer for the ZDF studio in Singapore, and during that time she traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Indochina, Australia, and New Zealand.

After studying German language and literature, journalism, and political science at the Free University of Berlin, Sabine began her journalistic career in the early 1980s as a court reporter for the daily newspaper *taz*. She then worked at SFB – Sender Freies Berlin, first as a writer for youth radio, later as an editor and host for *Zeitfunk*, and, starting in 1997, for *Info-Radio*. Her focus was on foreign and security policy, and one of the highlights of her career was her assignment to Pakistan as a radio correspondent in late 2001, at the start of the war in Afghanistan.

After nearly three decades, Sabine Porn left public broadcasting and joined the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt’s Global Dialogue division. Her wanderlust and interest in the bigger picture have remained. But now she no longer “just” reports on these topics; instead, she works directly on international dialogue initiatives that contribute to greater understanding and, hopefully, to change.