Today and in the future: In 1961, Eppendorf brought the first piston-stroke pipette to market and changed the ways of working in labs around the world forever. Today, labs are going digital and pipettes are connected.
The need for innovative lab designs is becoming increasingly important as processing higher workloads faster and more predictably is demanded. This is no more apparent than in high-throughput (HT) analysis, a key theme of modern science that permeates through sectors from clinical diagnostics to academic research. With ever-developing technological advances, analysis of hundreds or even thousands of samples per day is possible in any given laboratory, facilitating large-scale experiments in areas such as compound testing and drug screening. In addition, HT analysis has become essential in clinical diagnostics and population-wide screening. As of April 2021, in the US alone, close to 370 million COVID-19 tests have been carried out1. As with other HT applications, this translates to billions of pipetting steps that have to be carried out with manual instruments or automated pipetting systems.