The Resonance Test 93: The Lab of the Future with Sridhar Iyengar and Chris Waller

The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

We’re talking about the lab of the future! Better than that… we’re *building* it. In this episode of *The Resonance Test,* two of the builders are giving us a tour of sorts! Listen as Sridhar Iyengar, Founder, Chief Strategy and Technology Officer and Chairman of Elemental Machines, and Chris Waller, EPAM’s VP and Chief Scientist, chew the scientific fat about creating a collaborative model cell and gene therapy laboratory. Waller says the lab of the future seeks to “reinvent the way we look at equipment and utilize equipment in a laboratory setting that's used to manufacture cells” by making it, as we say, real. “We’re building out that facility at the EPAM Continuum office in Boston and partnering with folks like Elemental Machines” to enable “the transformation that we're looking for in these laboratory settings.” Creating such a next-gen lab is a very complicated task, says Iyengar. “Unlike many other disciplines that are primarily software driven or even mechanically driven, the life sciences have a much greater degree of variability.” To minimize this variability, they’re putting an Amazon Go level of scrutiny on lab processes. AI, Iyengar says, “can spot patterns across an enormous number of variables and dimensions, much more than any human being can do… To do that you need lots of data, so you can cancel out the noise and you can find the signal in the noise.” The key step here, he adds, is to collect “as many dimensions of data as possible and make it computationally available.” Iyengar says that capturing the context around how lab data is collected is essential for making generative AI a useful lab tool. GenAI, he says, “creates something when you give it a prompt,” but in this case “the prompt has to include the context in which that work was carried out.” He reports being hopeful about GenAI’s role in the lab, “but I think we're still a few years away.” At present, says Waller, the EPAM Continuum facility enables us to give the future a test run. The lab “allows us to bring our clients, our members of the [Pistoia] Alliance [and] our technology partners together in a safe space to work collectively to derisk the introduction of new technologies into these laboratory settings and show us the future.” Iyengar adds that when he walks people through the lab, “You see their eyes light up and say, ‘Ohh, I get it; that means we can do XYZ!’” Listen to these two and you’ll soon be having your own XYZ thoughts. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon