NOVEMBER 2022LIFE SCIENCES REVIEW 19CXO INSIGHTSBy Dan O'Connor, VP Drug Discovery, Western Markets, Molecular DevicesMOLECULAR DEVICESCHALLENGES AND TRENDS IN THE SYTHETIC BIOLOGY SPACEan O'Connor is based out of Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area and works at Molecular Devices as VP Drug Discovery, Western Markets. He is essentially responsible for drug discovery and bio-pharma product lines in Europe and North America. With general experience is in microscopy and imaging and workflow solutions for the last 22 years, he has been associated with Molecular Devices since the last eight years.What are some of the trends and challenges you have witnessed in the synthetic biology space today?Mainly I would like to focus the discussion on the application of synthetic biology in the workflows in medicine relating to plasma preparation, cell engineering or Car T and also in 2D and 3D organoid models. Some of the challenges that we are facing is threefold; scalability, standardization, and the enormous size of the data that needs to be processed and analysed. In terms of scalability, in plasmid preparation specifically, the yield is very low. Scalability and reproducibility in medicine sector needs automation and intelligent workflows that only Molecular Devices offer as solutions in the modern day. As for standardization, we see customers manually writing down their lab processes. We have the capability to facilitate our customers to scale this with automation, electric notebooks and smart integrated feedback loops. All this data is tracked and verified for things like monoclonal verification and clone workflows, this data is sent to the FDA as a data packet for approval and standardization. In terms of data volume management, we have tried to tackle this challenge, however given the vastness of data and that is challenge is industry wide, there seems to be any good solution available in this aspect. We do offer some AI and ML solutions but the medicine sector is very new to these. A major indication of expansion for me would be solving this data management and integration issue, this will help the industry to grow to greater heights.How do you think has the synthetic biology space evolved over the years, now that you have mentioned the challenges and trends of the space?Our strategic vision over the last couple of years has been focused around cell line development, clone workflows, 3d and organoid workflows. Given the challenges I've mentioned earlier, scalability, standardization and vastness of data, our main mission is to provide customers with the tools that help them to deal with these challenges. To deal with scalability and standardization we now offer fully DDan O'Connor
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