Laboratory equipment

Picture this: the alarm on a ULT freezer storing valuable samples at low temperatures goes off at 2 a.m. on a Saturday, or maybe the alarm battery is dead entirely. No one is notified of the freezer failure, and the entire inventory is compromised. Alternatively, a digitalized lab avoids this crisis. In this scenario, a…

Over the past few decades, the idea of what counts as a lab has expanded from isolated benches and test rigs to globally distributed R&D environments that span cloud data centers, autonomous factories and national research campuses. The Top 100 Labs 2025 report profiles the commercial, institutional and national labs that are rebuilding their R&D…

On average, laboratories emit 425 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced, more than half the emissions of a coal plant.  Fume hoods account for a significant part of a lab’s energy consumption. Hoods run continuously, exhausting the air in the fume cupboard and forcing the HVAC system to work harder to replace…

When a cryogenic storage failure hit Karolinska Institutet’s Neo building over the 2023 Christmas holidays, it destroyed decades of samples in just five days. An interruption in the automatic liquid nitrogen refill for 16 of 19 cryogenic tanks allowed temperatures to rise beyond safe limits. Karolinska Institutet’s (KI) internal report later quantified the damage: approximately…

Brandtech Scientific has announced a strategic partnership with Copia Scientific to strengthen sales and service for the BRAND Liquid Handling Station (LHS) product line across the United States and Canada. The LHS is a compact benchtop pipetting robot designed for low-to-medium throughput labs, handling volumes from 1–1000 µL with interchangeable single-channel and 8-channel liquid ends.…

Thermo Fisher Scientific has launched the TSQ Certis triple quadrupole mass spectrometer, a new LC-MS/MS platform aimed at routine and high-throughput labs in biopharma, clinical and translational research, and environmental and food safety testing. The company says the system is designed to improve consistency and reduce downtime in targeted quantitation workflows. A central claim is…

Making industrial and military magnets from rare earth metals is a dirty job, often relegated to countries with limited environmental oversight. Now, Gadolyn Inc., headquartered in Austin, Texas, has developed a way to do it cleanly, paving the way to bringing production back to the U.S. The traditional molten salt electrolysis method, used around the…

Thermo Fisher Scientific has opened its East Coast Advanced Therapies Collaboration Center, or ATxCC, in Philadelphia, a move that places the life sciences supplier directly inside the operations of early-stage cell and gene therapy developers. The center sits inside BioLabs for Advanced Therapeutics, a newly expanded 53,000-square-foot incubator in the city’s fast-growing “Cellicon Valley” cluster.…

The 3 mm Multi-Nuclear Inverse (MNI) CryoProbe is a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) detector “combining the highest sensitivity and versatility,” according to the R&D 100 2025 team at Bruker who developed it.  The Ultra-Sensitive 3 mm MNI CryoProbe Scientists working in discovery and development were having difficulties characterizing lead compounds and their related substances considering…

Atlanta’s west side is getting a new kind of lab district. Science Square, an 18-acre mixed-use development next to Georgia Tech’s Midtown campus, is being marketed as a regional life sciences hub, with a purpose-built lab tower, residential high-rises and street-level retail clustered around new pedestrian links and a shared “home for discovery.” Within Science…

Automation was supposed to help R&D labs run more smoothly, freeing scientists from repetitive work so they could focus on discovery. And sometimes it does do that. But the reality now is messier. In a recent survey of 856 biopharma R&D professionals, 31% cited lack of flexibility and 30% pointed to poor integration as top…

Shimadzu Scientific Instruments has introduced the i-Series LC-2070 and LC-2080 integrated high-performance liquid chromatographs (HPLC), the latest models in its i-Series line. The LC-2070/LC-2080 systems are benchtop HPLCs with automation features spanning start-up to shut-down, including automated bubble detection and resolution, self-diagnostics, predictive maintenance tools and recovery functions. An integrated column management platform (iCMP) tracks…

As 10x Genomics plugs Anthropic’s Claude into its cloud analysis stack, Michael Schnall-Levin, the company’s chief technology officer, is less interested in the novelty of “natural-language pipelines” than in solving a stubborn problem he calls the last mile of single-cell analysis. For years, 10x has invested heavily in software and visualization tools to automate early-stage…

As Anthropic rolls out Claude for Life Sciences, 10x Genomics is positioning its cloud as the analysis engine behind natural-language queries on giant single-cell datasets. “What we just launched is a meaningful first step toward that: an integration with Claude where we expose an MCP interface to the tools we have in our cloud,” said…

TESTA Analytical has introduced instrument-optimized differential refractive index (DRI) detector kits aimed at HPLC system manufacturers that want to integrate DRI into their platforms. According to the company, the detector kits are designed to meet the specific mechanical and electronic requirements of different HPLC systems, drawing on TESTA Analytical’s experience in opto-electronics, fluidics, temperature control,…

Every lab has a Friday-night freezer story. The alarm chirps, people scramble, and someone winds up babysitting samples with a clipboard that was never meant to be a forensic record. As instruments fill the lab and teams shift from wielding pipettes to orchestrating cloud workflows and collaborating with AI agents, the margin for ad hoc…

[Image from Adobe Stock] Why you should read this report: Lab automation looks hot, but the usual indicators are quiet: patents are flat, vendors report uneven demand, and standard market metrics barely move. This report shows what those signals miss—where recent AI-drug-discovery capital actually landed, why “Lab Automation Engineer” roles increasingly require Python and APIs…

Almost a year after Nature called spatial proteomics the “Method of the Year,” the market is expected to reach $99.1 million in 2025, up from $87.5 million in 2024. Interestingly, the rise of spatial proteomics and spatial biology led to legal disputes between some of the top companies: 10x Genomics, NanoString and Bruker.  The legal…

10x Genomics has launched the next generation of its Chromium Flex assay with plate-based multiplexing and automation compatibility. The company positions the update to address demand for high-throughput single-cell analysis in pharma and large research programs, saying it will “massively scale single cell research.”The new Flex supports up to 384 samples and “up to 100…

Thermo Fisher Scientific beat Wall Street expectations in the third quarter of 2025, reporting $11.12 billion in revenue and adjusted earnings of $5.79 per share. The results signal resilience for lab infrastructure demand even as U.S. research budgets face headwinds and the U.S. government shutdown is in its 22nd day. The Waltham, Mass.–based company’s Laboratory…

Google Cloud and multiple healthcare partners announced production deployments of AI agents on Oct. 16, timed to the release of Google Cloud’s second annual ROI of AI in healthcare & life sciences report and the start of HLTH 2025, held October 19–22 in Las Vegas. The announcements include clinical-note summarization at scale at Hackensack Meridian…

Thermo Fisher is entering a collaboration with OpenAI to “help to improve the speed and success of drug development,” the company announced today. Thermo Fisher is embedding OpenAI Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) into product development, service delivery, customer engagement and operational efficiency, the company said.  Thermo Fisher said the collaboration will shorten the cycle time…

Waters Corporation has integrated its DESI XS ion source with the benchtop Xevo MRT high-resolution mass spectrometer, expanding ambient mass spectrometry imaging options on the MRT platform. The pairing brings DESI imaging, label-free chemical analysis directly from sample surfaces with minimal preparation, to Waters’ highest-performing benchtop QTof. The update was highlighted around the International Mass…

Thermo Fisher Scientific released Chromeleon 7.4, a unified chromatography and mass spectrometry data system that supports single-quad, triple-quad, and HRAM instruments and adds centralized storage, remote access, audit trails, and e-signatures for GxP/21 CFR Part 11 compliance in biopharma, food safety, and environmental labs, according to a press release. Chromeleon 7.4 is built for networked…

The lab of the future is an automated vision that the scientific community is already constructing. With lab benches replaced by self-enclosed robotic hoods and liquid handlers, scientists can work on more complex tasks on their computers or remotely from a central office space. As we adopt automation to make the synthesis of large molecules…