OSLA

Open Source Laboratory Automation

Photo by Testalize.me on Unsplash

Robots are revolutionizing wet labs and drug discovery. Automation is now standard practice in pharmaceutical research environments. However, commercial, off-the-shelf systems are tailored towards high-end, commercial labs and are financially completely out of reach for most basic science labs, which greatly limits discovery power. In the last few years, general-use robotic arms have dropped in price tremendously and are now well within the purchasing power of even starting labs, but no open-source software exists for lab applications. Therefore, academic labs still cannot leverage the tremendous progress made in lab automation.

We here propose to develop an open-source, dynamic scheduling software for lab automation. As a direct application, we will use this platform to screen bacteria-killing viruses and thereby find new ways to combat antibiotic-resistant infections. Furthermore, we expect that the software will be widely used to tackle diverse problems within the life sciences.

Participating organisations

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Netherlands eScience Center
Life Sciences
Life Sciences

Team

YM
Yuval Mulla
Lead Applicant
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Adam Belloum
Adam Belloum
Technology Lead
Netherlands eScience Center
Dani Bodor
Dani Bodor
eScience Research Engineer
Netherlands eScience Center