Benchling for Lab Automation: Harness the full potential of your lab hardware

Benchling for Lab Automation is a new addition to the Benchling platform that gives life science R&D teams a centralized environment to design, document, run, and analyze up to 10,000 samples at once. Working seamlessly with liquid handling hardware and analytical instrumentation, Benchling helps life science companies maximize output from their automation investments and accelerate the path to discovery.

The potential of lab robotics and instrumentation has been hampered by legacy software. Modern life science R&D workflows are highly iterative, which means scientists need to rapidly test process variants. However, traditional LIMS solutions are highly rigid, leading to days or weeks of custom development whenever a scientist needs to adjust a lab automation workflow. Some lab automation point solutions are more flexible than traditional LIMS, but they’re siloed from other informatics systems. When scientists need to move the data into another system, they need to manually manipulate the data, leading to lost productivity, the potential for errors, and a lack of traceability between automation outputs and upstream entities.

Benchling for Lab Automation gives life science companies a flexible, seamless interface between the Benchling platform and lab robotics such as liquid handlers. For the first time, scientists can configure experiments, process up to 10,000 samples at once, and pull results directly into the Benchling Notebook. In the context of hybridoma screening, a scientist would process thousands of supernatant samples and pull titer and affinity ranking data into the Notebook. The system then automatically updates the Benchling Inventory and Registry and ties results to relevant Notebook entries, giving scientists full sample traceability – for hybridoma screening, the mouse, hybridoma, supernatant, and associated results would all be interlinked. And when researchers want to test a new process variant, they can set it up in minutes, without the need for any custom code. Shifting from hybridoma screening to B-cell screening would take mere minutes.

Benchling for Lab Automation's flexibility and seamless connection with the Benchling platform lead to increased experimental scale, enhanced productivity, improved data integrity, and deeper experimental insights. Scientists can save more than 10 hours per experimental run and analyze outputs alongside a complete, interlinked experimental history.

Benchling for Lab Automation includes:

• Robot orchestration based on your unique input parameters and samples

• Output file parsing and documentation to automatically create and update entities in Registry and Inventory

• End-to-end, automated sample tracking throughout your workflows without manual intervention

Clients such as Recursion Pharmaceuticals are already using Benchling for Lab Automation to power data-centric drug discovery.

As a digital biology company, Recursion is industrializing drug discovery with a high-throughput, high-content, data-centric approach, and harnessing automation is critical to our success. We are thrilled to partner with Benchling to enable flexible and seamless capture of standardized data across many scaled assays.- Mason Victors, Chief Product Officer @ Recursion Pharmaceuticals

We’re also excited to announce the Benchling Plug-and-Play program. We’re partnering with lab automation providers Tecan, Hamilton, and PAA to support the rapid integration between the top instrumentation players and Benchling for Lab Automation.

Our customers increasingly demand end-to-end data traceability tracked through a sample management software that is integrated with automation. We are delighted to work with Benchling to deliver on this need.- Jason Meredith, Head of Software Product Management @ Tecan

Benchling for Lab Automation is used across a variety of different use cases and is vendor agnostic. Life science companies are already leveraging the product for:

• Lead Screening

• Lead Optimization & Characterization

• Cell Line Development

• Process Development

• Formulations

• Next Generation Sequencing

• Fermentation Screening

• CRISPR Assemblies

• And more!