SLAS Honors New Products, Startups and Scientific Excellence at its Record-Breaking 2026 International Conference and Exhibition in Boston

Oak Brook, IL (February 12, 2026) — Breaking exhibitor and attendance records in Boston, the SLAS hosted 419 exhibitors and more than 7,600 registrants from 47 countries at its 2026 International Conference and Exhibition, February 7-11.

“We were thrilled to see that our European attendance was consistent with years past,” said SLAS CEO Vicki Loise. “The exhibition was high energy with a lot of ‘active shoppers’ on the floor this year, along with those doing research and looking for the latest automation solutions, software and AI support.”

The SLAS International Conference and Exhibition is North America’s largest gathering of laboratory automation providers and users of these products for life sciences research. Each year, SLAS presents up to three New Product Awards to exhibitors at the show. The winners this year are:

2026 New Product Award Winners

• Beckman Coulter Life Sciences (Indianapolis, IN, USA) in collaboration with HSE-AG (Switzerland), for the eviDense UV Photometer, which is designed to streamline nucleic acid quantification by embedding the photometer directly onto the deck of Beckman’s Biomek i-Series automated workstations.

• BioDot’s Nanolab™ is a high-precision liquid handling system engineered for advanced genomics workflows that demand ultra-low-volume accuracy. BioDot (Irvine, CA, USA) was selected because this product solves the engineering challenge of using plastic tips for small-volume dispenses.

• Emulate’s AVA™ Emulation System (Boston, MA, USA), a next-generation Organ-Chip platform that’s engineered to make human-relevant in vitro biology accessible, scalable and automation-ready.

2026 SLAS Ignite Award

SLAS also presented the Ignite Award to the most promising start-up company within Innovation AveNEW, a designated area of the exhibition floor for startups. This award highlights the effort involved in bringing new innovations to the marketplace. Eight finalists were judged on their company’s marketing presence and potential, ability to communicate their value proposition, funding prospects, growth plans, and balanced leadership.

XDemics Corporation (Novato, CA, USA) was chosen for their High Density Cell Respiration™ cell expansion technology, facilitating the scalability of cell production. XDemics’ innovation combines a gas-permeable membrane with an exclusive geometric design to create ideal replicative niches for cells growth. This unique system ensures high-density cell growth while maintaining quality, scalability, and efficiency across research and industrial applications.

2026 SLAS Student Poster Awards

The SLAS2026 International Conference and Exhibition also honors excellence in scientific research. Three students walked away with Student Poster Awards:

• Christian Reinhardt, University of Michigan: A Low-Cost and Scalable pH Assay for Microplate-based Growth Experiments

• Renate Roeterink, University of Melbourne: A 96-Well-Compatible Device for Investigating Mechanosensitive GPCR Signaling in a Dynamic Fluid Flow System

• Yining (Irene) Wang, National Institutes of Health: High-Throughput Functional Neurotoxicity Assay Using Brain Region-Specific Neural Spheroid Models

2026 SLAS Innovation Awards

Finally, SLAS’s largest award, the $10,000 Innovation Award, was presented to Steven Finkbeiner, PhD, of Gladstone and the University of California, San Francisco (USA). His podium presentation, “Development and Application of AI-powered Label-free Imaging for Assays and Screening,” was part of the conference’s Assay Development and Screening track.

The award’s judges noted that Finkbeiner’s presentation brought together the nexus of AI, vision, and autonomy and advanced researchers’ understanding and intervention of complex biology, not only in neurodegenerative diseases, but broadly across other areas of cellular analysis and screening.

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SLAS (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening) is an international professional society of academic, industry and government life sciences researchers and the developers and providers of laboratory automation technology. The SLAS mission is to bring together researchers in academia, industry and government to advance life sciences discovery and technology via education, knowledge exchange and global community building.

SLAS publishes two peer-reviewed and MEDLINE-indexed scientific journals, SLAS Discovery and SLAS Technology. For more information about SLAS and its journals, visit www.slas.org/journals.

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