It’s 1 a.m. on America’s West Coast, but the Emerald Cloud Lab south of San Francisco is still busy. Here, more than 100 pieces of high-end bioscience equipment churn out on largely unmanned workbenches 24 hours a day, seven days a week, performing experiments for researchers around the world. I’m “visiting” through the camera of a chest-high telepresence robot, being led around the 1,400-square-meter (15,000-square-foot) lab by Emerald CEO Brian Frezza, who’s also sitting at home . There are no real scientists anywhere, just a few workers in blue coats silently following the instructions on their trolley screens, making sure the instruments are loaded with reagents and samples.
Cloud labs mean that anyone, anywhere can conduct experiments with remote control, using nothing but their web browser. Experiments are programmed through a subscription-based online interface: the software coordinates robots and automated scientific instruments to perform the experiment and process the data. Friday night is the busiest time of Emerald week as scientists schedule experiments while relaxing with their families over the weekend.
There are still things robots can’t do, such as lifting giant cylinders (liquid containers) or unwrapping mailed samples, and there are some instruments that simply can’t be automated. Hence the people in blue coats, who look a bit like pickers in an Amazon warehouse. It turns out that they are, in fact, mostly former Amazon employees.
Connecting an experiment to a browser forces researchers to translate the exact details of each step into unambiguous code
Emerald originally employed scientists and lab technicians to help keep the facility running smoothly, but they were creatively stifled with so little to do. Amazon employee poaching has turned out to be an improvement. “We’re paying them double what they were getting at Amazon to do something much more fulfilling than putting toilet paper in boxes,” says Frezza. “You’re keeping someone’s drug discovery experiment going full throttle.”
Further south, in the San Francisco Bay Area, there are two more cloud labs, run by the company Strateos. Racks of shiny life science instruments (incubators, mixers, mass spectrometers, PCR machines) are housed inside large Perspex boxes known as work cells. The setting is definitely even more futuristic than in Emerald. Here, reagents and samples arrive at the correct work cell on high-tech magnetic conveyor belts and are gently loaded into place by dexterous robotic arms. Researchers’ experiments are “delocalized,” as Strateos’ chief operating officer Marc Siladi puts it.
The Emerald Cloud Lab in South San Francisco. The laboratories are equipped with more than 200 types of scientific instruments that can be controlled remotely from a ‘command center’ software. Photo: Emerald Cloud
Automation in science is nothing new, especially in fields like molecular biology, where much experimental work involves the laborious and repetitive transfer of small amounts of liquid from one vial to another. The disruption caused by the pandemic also encouraged several specialized facilities to develop ways to operate their equipment remotely. (Beams from the UK’s powerful Diamond Light Source, for example a particle accelerator that generates high-energy radiation to research matter, can now be operated by users anywhere in the world.) And outsourcing elements difficult or time-consuming. the experimental process is not new either.
But Emerald and Strateos are different: these are the first labs in the world that, in theory, allow anyone with a laptop and a credit card to “pay and play” with the entire reagent inventory and instrumentation suite available in a world-class research facility. The appeal of this approach became clear during the pandemic, when many researchers were unable to visit their own labs in person; founders of cloud labs say this is the future of life sciences.
The most obvious benefit is productivity: researchers can run multiple experiments at once and queue them up to run overnight or while doing other things. “Our professional users will do the work of 10 scientists in a traditional lab,” says Frezza. “They’re going to do ridiculous numbers.”
There is no time spent assembling and disassembling equipment, cleaning, maintaining and fixing instruments or restocking. Arctoris, a remotely operated drug discovery laboratory in Oxfordshire, says its platform has completed projects for pharmaceutical companies in 24 hours that could take at least a week in a traditional environment. Instead of pipetting for hours each day, researchers can spend more time thinking, reading and analyzing results with their colleagues.
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh were so impressed by what staff and students could do at the Emerald Cloud Lab, one researcher managed to recreate years of his doctoral experimentation in a matter of weeks, that they recently asked the company to build another one, just for them.
With a year’s worth of access to a cloud lab often costing less than the price of a single piece of high-end lab equipment, Carnegie Mellon’s Faculty of Science Dean Rebecca Doerge says the model it could be transformative. “I’m not just interested in changing science at Carnegie Mellon. I’m interested in changing the process of science around the world,” he says of the new Pittsburgh facility. “We all have colleagues in under-resourced places who can’t do the science they’re capable of just because they don’t have enough money. So with an Internet connection and access to a cloud lab, this is a game changer game”.
A Strateos Smart Lab in San Diego. The company claims to have “reimagined the lab as an intelligent data generation center.” Photography: Strateos
Doerge, a statistician turned scientific administrator, is also excited about eliminating variation and human error from experimental work. There will be no scientists based at the new 1,500-square-meter (16,000-square-foot) site, just a half-dozen technicians helping the site run 24 hours a day. “People still go to wet labs and they still sit there and make mistakes. I don’t think everything is automatable in science, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that repetitive things, once you learn them, you don’t have to sit there doing – them again and again and again.
Scientists like Doerge believe the precision of remotely operated labs could help solve what has come to be known as science’s “reproducibility crisis” — the troubling revelation that published research results cannot be replicated when different groups of scientists follow suit. methods exactly. Connecting an experiment to a browser to be performed by robots forces researchers to translate the exact details of each step into unambiguous code. For example, what might once have been described in a scientific paper as “mixing the samples” becomes detailed computer instructions for a certain machine to mix at a certain number of revolutions per minute for a certain time. Other factors that could affect the result, such as the ambient temperature at the time, are captured in the metadata.
While we have to remember that most people come from a good place, there are also some pretty crazy people out there
As Doerge has encouraged more and more research, and even teaching, at Carnegie Mellon to be moved to remote labs, not all of his colleagues have supported him. Many scientists think that working alongside colleagues at the bench and the sights and sounds of experimentation are what help generate exciting ideas and happy accidents. Others are concerned about the quality of data produced in laboratories they have never set foot in. “‘If I don’t see it with my own eyes, it doesn’t exist,’ I’ve heard that from some of the senior faculty members,” Doerge says. “It’s a change in mindset for sure.”
Some experts believe that providing access to sophisticated laboratories is a potential biosecurity or bioterrorism threat. In theory, small groups or even individuals with no research experience could use a cloud lab to start performing complex biological experiments. “Laboratories say they only work with trusted partners, but of course they are very keen to open up their market,” says Dr Filippa Lentzos, an expert in biorisk and biosecurity at King’s College London. “While we have to remember that most people are coming from a good place, there are also some pretty crazy people out there. The barriers definitely come down if you want to do something deliberately harmful.”
The cloud labs say they review all scheduled experiments and have systems in place to flag or reject any that appear illegal or dangerous. In addition, they argue, the complete digitization of everything that happens in the lab makes it easier to record and monitor what people are doing than in a traditional lab.
Paul Freemont, co-founder of the UK Innovation and Knowledge Center for Synthetic Biology, has helped develop several highly automated laboratories in the UK, including a robotic platform that was able to perform more than 1,000 Covid tests a day early in the pandemic. It is not certain that remotely operated laboratories are yet “mature” enough to replicate what is available to scientists setting up their own automated equipment. “I like the concept and I think this is the way science is going to go. It would work if we had all the necessary protocols and workflows that a biologist might need, but I don’t think it’s currently available at the level of complexity and detail that a need”.
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University. The institution has asked Emerald to build a dedicated cloud lab for it. Photo: Tim Kaulen/Carnegie Mellon University
Freemont also has concerns that scientists don’t really understand or…