SLAS 2024 Microscale Innovation in Life Sciences Symposium

Session one: Miniaturization for Screening Applications
Session Chair: Etienne Croquette (Optimation UK)
Micro-compartmentalization strategies that go beyond the ubiquitous use of the microtiter plates is an area of rapid growth. This session will focus on technologies that apply microfluidics and Pico/nano-scale platforms to enable drug discovery efforts.

Session two: Microfluidics Technologies
Session Co-Chairs: Kendra Nyberg (Calico Labs) and Amar Basu (Wayne State University)
Microfluidics has revolutionized the ability to manipulate and assay biological samples to make measurements with high precision and high accuracy while leveraging the key advantages of small volume fluid physics. This session will highlight advances of microfluidic technologies for single cell analysis, cell sorting, molecular and point of care diagnostics.

Session three: Advances in Organ-on-chip Platforms
Session Chair: Rhiannon David (AstraZeneca)
Organs-on-chips enable precise control of the cellular microenvironment providing improved in vivo relevance of in vitro cultures. Typically, these models are low throughput and analysis is done via off-chip analytical techniques and assays. This session will highlight advances in miniaturization, automation and integration of in situ analysis methods on-chip, which can accelerate and enhance the information that can be obtained from these organ chips.

Session four: The Convergence of Artificial Intelligence and Microfluidics
Session Chair: Sammy Datwani (Systemic Bio)
Microfluidics permits the automated manipulation of fluids at the microscale with high throughput and spatiotemporal precision, enabling the generation of large, multidimensional datasets. Artificial intelligence (AI) provides a powerful predictive tool with the ability to learn from data. AI-produced outcomes have been proven comparable or even superior to the performance of human experts in drug design, material discovery, and personalized medicine. The goal of this session is to highlight cutting-edge technological innovations on the microscale integrated with AI/ML that together have the immense potential to reshape life science research and the clinical care paradigms.

Closing Panel: Integrating Microscale Into Your Lab
Session Co-Chairs: Amar Basu (Wayne State University) and Rhiannon David (AstraZeneca)
This panel brings different approaches and best practices together to identify the challenges, nuances, and possibilities of integrating Microscale innovations into existing labs.