A few years ago, artificial intelligence and Internet medicine were still the topic centers of China's medical industry. At this time, the smart lab is just a hidden corner that has never been swept by the spotlight. But in every era, there are always a group of people, "the prophet of spring river water heating duck", who feel the changes of seasons and times in the chilly early winter. Pharmaceutical companies and equipment manufacturers closely related to the laboratory scene have made layout after sensing the change. Multinational enterprises such as Beckman, Abbott, Roche, Siemens and Agilent have formed a complete layout of smart laboratories. In China, with the development of pharmaceutical industry and equipment development as the capital market, the intelligent laboratory in the upstream has begun to emerge. The development of digital and automation technologies is gradually leading the reform of the medical and health industry. At the same time, all links of the value chain of the medical industry will be reconstructed in the intervention of these technologies, bringing more new needs and opportunities. The laboratory is an important scene of this reform. In order to understand the development status and problems faced in the field of domestic smart laboratories and look for development opportunities, arterial network has exchanged with several smart laboratory practitioners in China, hoping to provide reference to people in the industry. Laboratory automation and digitization are the inevitable trend of the times With the development of biotechnology, the market's demand for drug research and development, biological experiments and testing has soared. At the same time, routine experimental operations still rely on manual operation to a large extent, and there are many repetitive and mechanized work in the process, which also leads to the emergence of high human cost, low experimental efficiency and uncontrollable data quality. For example, at the automation level, the automatic control system basically does not have the level of automatic control of the whole process; The automation of equipment is mostly closed to the outside world, so it is unable to provide necessary quality parameters and process conditions; Some enterprises have not yet realized MES (Manufacturing Execution System) and automatic batch control in a complete sense. At the digital level, the financial management, supply, marketing and inventory management, customer management and other sectors of pharmaceutical enterprises are not deeply integrated with the production process, and the new generation technologies such as Internet of things, big data and cloud computing have not generally begun to be explored. A variety of digital and automation technologies have created opportunities for laboratory reform. The digital laboratory uses advanced real-time data analysis and continuous process verification to track trends, prevent deviations or exceeding specifications, and optimize scheduling. These laboratories transition from manual data transcription to automatic data transcription between equipment and general laboratory information management system (glims). Improve the utilization of personnel, equipment and materials by reducing manual documentation and automating and optimizing planning and scheduling, so as to improve the efficiency of the laboratory. It is understood that through the empowerment of digital technology, the cost of general chemical quality control laboratory can be reduced by 25% to 45%. Potential savings for general microbiology laboratories will range from 15% to 35%. Automated laboratories use robots, collaborative robots or more specific advanced automation technologies to perform all repeatable tasks, such as sample production and delivery. In addition, laboratory automation pays more attention to high-throughput experiments, obtains more experimental results, and ensures the consistency and stability of the result data. Application scenarios, such as microbial detection, biochemical immune diagnosis, molecular diagnosis, etc. Automated laboratories can be built on the basis of digitization, so as to achieve greater value and higher cost savings. The reason why these laboratories can improve productivity is due to the automation of sampling and sample delivery tasks, sample preparation tasks, and reduced equipment maintenance costs through remote monitoring and fault prevention. Moreover, automation also reduces the sampling and related logistics tasks performed outside the laboratory. Through the communication with people in the industry, we know that the laboratory scene is being seen more by all parties in the market. The reasons include the following aspects: First, China's loopholes in the field of drug supervision put forward higher requirements for the digital management of pharmaceutical enterprises. In 2018, a number of domestic pharmaceutical enterprises were inspected and dealt with due to problems in data integrity and reliability, such as falsification of production records, which exposed loopholes in China's drug supervision. The policy also puts forward higher requirements for the digital level of pharmaceutical enterprises. In addition, China's pharmaceutical enterprises are still in a relatively traditional production mode. Most links such as R & D, production and circulation are recorded manually. External events have become the prelude to promoting the digital reform of the pharmaceutical industry. Second, the novel coronavirus pneumonia also increased the number of pharmaceutical companies to invest in digital transformation. On the one hand, in the short term, a large number of funds from the market have poured into the pharmaceutical industry, enabling pharmaceutical enterprises to invest in the field of digital construction; On the other hand, various efficiency problems under the epidemic appear, and the willingness of pharmaceutical enterprises to digital transformation is enhanced. The pharmaceutical industry is developing rapidly, and the requirements for R & D speed are higher and higher. The involvement of digital technology can speed up the R & D and development of the pharmaceutical industry. Third, the rapid development of underlying technology provides researchers with more choice tools. The digital technology represented by Internet of things, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence has laid the conditions for the emergence of smart laboratory. Automation technology solves the problem of how to generate data, while digital technology completes the work of collecting, quantitative description, recording and analyzing data. Digital technology can build a more direct and efficient intelligent platform for the laboratory, break the plane link between people and the environment and between people and things in the past, so as to realize the efficient management of personnel, safety, environment and equipment in the laboratory. Local innovators Nuggets blue ocean market Zeng yingzhe, partner of Mingshi capital, once said at an event that at present, the digitization of the laboratory is still in its infancy in China, and it is difficult to estimate its scale in China with existing tools for the time being. In addition to the traditional Lin and ELN, many new tools are also emerging. However, from the perspective of the pharmaceutical industry, the global pharmaceutical market is about US $1.5 trillion. Under such a large volume, it still maintains an annual growth of 7% - 8%, and laboratory digitization has played a great role. In addition, other life sciences, materials, food safety and other fields need digital laboratory services, so its market scale in China is very considerable. However, this big market has long been occupied by foreign giants. Abbott, Siemens, Roche, Beckman and other large enterprises have formed a good quality assurance at home and abroad and won the favor of customers with their decades or even hundreds of years of experience. On January 1, 2022, the newly revised science and technology progress law was officially implemented. Among them, the national laboratory is mentioned for the first time as an important part of the national strategic scientific and technological force, and ranks first. A new track is quietly opening. According to statistics, as of April 2022, nearly 100 "provincial laboratories" across the country have been officially unveiled or started preparations for construction. The mushrooming laboratories are undoubtedly another good thing for the laboratory to support the tool industry. With the advent of the domestic innovation in the field of life sciences, and the challenge of COVID-19's overseas supply chain cycle and product safety, it is imperative that bioscience support the localization of industrial tools. According to incomplete statistics, the current domestic enterprises in the field of laboratory automation and laboratory digitization are as follows: After 2020 is the active period of smart laboratory, and many enterprises have completed a new round of financing. Founded in 2020, xuanren technology has completed two rounds of financing totaling nearly 100 million yuan. Xuanren technology focuses on laboratory automation. With its core team's many years of experience in product R & D and team management in the robot industry, it aims to apply standardized products and solutions in the field of life sciences. Its products are widely used in medical treatment, drug R & D, in vitro diagnosis, biological sample Bank and genetic engineering, which greatly improves the efficiency and quality of experiments. Shipu technology, which focuses on laboratory digitization, completed two rounds of financing in March and July 2021 respectively. Shipu technology has been selected as the world's top accelerator y combinator and Microsoft accelerator. It uses aiot, Internet of things digital intelligence platform and artificial intelligence base to ensure the safety and compliance of laboratories in all walks of life, improve efficiency and reduce cost, and enable digital decision-making. Customers are widely distributed in biomedicine, inspection and monitoring, scientific research institutes, intelligent supervision and other industries, helping customers realize automatic and intelligent management in five links: human, machine, material, law and environment, and comprehensively improve operation efficiency. Not long ago, in March, the zebrafish benchmarking benchling completed the angel round financing exclusively invested by Jiacheng capital. Zebrafish focuses on building a life science R & D data platform, hoping to boost the R & D efficiency of life science by strengthening the mining of data value. After more than a year of research and development, zebrafish has preliminarily completed the construction of easy to read notes. Now it has main modules such as project management, experimental records, registration center and inventory, which can cover most use scenarios of biological laboratories. In 2022, zebrafish will launch the cloud version of easy to read notes, and gradually increase the functions of biological online tools, data processing and report generation. In addition to being recognized by the capital market, some enterprises have also made new breakthroughs in products. For example, Huada Zhizao, which started the development of laboratory automation technology and products in 2016, launched a new generation of automated sample preparation system mgisp-smart 8 at the international genomics Conference (ICG) in 2021, which achieved a major breakthrough in flexibility and intelligence, further improved the product line of Huada Zhizao laboratory automation equipment, and opened up the application scenarios of the automated production line. In 2021, Kunpeng laboratory phase I, the first domestic general intelligent automatic biological laboratory independently developed by MGGA, was officially completed in Beijing Changping District Life Science Park. At the same time, mga has also begun to layout automatic biological laboratories meeting different functions in Shanghai and Suzhou, which is expected to be officially put into use in 2022. Domestic intelligent laboratories are blocked and long If a field wants to become bigger and stronger from scratch, it is bound to have various problems on the road of growth, and the smart laboratory is no exception. So, what are the key challenges facing these innovative enterprises? The diverse needs of customers require enterprises to provide more solid underlying technology. He Xueying, founder of xuanren technology, said that different life science laboratory scenarios will have different use needs. The most difficult point is how to plan and design modular equipment to meet customers' non-standard needs. The practice of xuanren technology is to gradually realize and continue to promote, and adapt and meet the needs of diverse scenes through standardized module combinations. Wang Jiaying, senior investment manager of HaoChen capital, once shared two automation difficulties at an activity: one is the difficulty at the technical level. It is difficult for robots to completely reproduce human actions. They not only need to develop many precise structural designs, but also use AI, algorithm and other technologies to make robot people have eyes, brain and self-adjustment ability. Second, the accumulation of industry and process knowledge. For example, the types of samples to be processed by the robot vary greatly, and the physical and chemical properties are different (different density, fineness, viscosity, corrosivity, etc.), so it is necessary to accumulate a set of process database to ensure the stability and reliability of the robot