Ep#024: Moving the Lab to a Cloud with Toby Blackburn

Personalized Medicine Podcast

Scientists today still spend an enormous amount of time on physical labor: pipetting, feeding cells, taking microscope images and performing all kinds of other experiments manually. That leaves researchers with a very limited time to do their core activities such as reading, talking to their colleagues and coming up with new hypotheses. Our guest on this episode is coming from an organization that is aiming to change that. Welcome on the show Toby Blackburn, the Head of Business Development and Strategy at Emerald Cloud Lab (ECL). ECL has built a lab that can be accessed virtually by any scientist from any corner of the world to perform specific experiments by simply designing and programming them via an online interface. In this episode Toby explains how the ECL lab works and how cloud based lab solutions are going to shape the future of R&D in pharma and life science industries.
Together with Toby we discussed:
◦ Need for automation and reproducibility in biomedical research
◦ The advent of cloud labs in the biotech industry
◦ Advantages that cloud labs can offer scientists around the globe
◦ Using AI and ML to optimize experimental workflows
◦ Facilitation of research collaborations with cloud technology
◦ Pharma R&D in the age of COVID
◦ The role of cloud labs in drug manufacturing
◦ Industrial applications of cloud labs beyond biotech
◦ Outlook on the future of experimentation in life sciences
Get in touch with Toby:
◦ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobiasblackburn/
◦ Web (ECL): https://www.emeraldcloudlab.com/