Automata, a London-based biotech company providing robotic automation solutions to the life sciences industry, has signed a collaboration agreement with University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust (UHS) to develop new applications for laboratory automation technology.
The collaboration hopes to find ways to apply automation in order to enhance patient care and reduce pressure on scientists and NHS services, with UHS acting as development partner and reference site.
Together, both organisations will develop a plan for automating existing manual diagnostic processes within labs, analysing the benefits this can bring to staff efficiency, as well as applying automation to other disease areas within UHS – including chemotherapy dosing.
What’s more, the partnership will examine the wider role of automation in supporting the NHS’s goals of recovering services post-Covid, bringing about personalised medicine and improving overall patient outcomes.
The collaboration agreement builds on Automata and UHS’s existing relationship, which saw the implementation of new automated technology within the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Saliva Testing Laboratory in 2020 to support testing during the Covid-19 pandemic and clear diagnostic backlog.
Martin Gossling, head of commercial innovation at UHS, said: “A key legacy of delivering saliva testing as part of the national Covid-19 response has been how we can apply the automation of processes on a wider scale across the clinical sector.
“Partnering with Automata has allowed us to combine our knowledge of laboratory work and access to it, with their technological solutions that will ultimately result in more efficient processes at scale that will benefit the NHS and the patients we serve.”
