Laboratory equipment

Whatever your take on the current AI wave, it is clear that the prospect of creating software has been transformed. “The most impressive edge of it is probably using [genAI models] to help speed code development. And that’s kind of working,” said the computer scientist Jaron Lanier recently. Frontier AI labs are now pushing for…

Tecan’s latest bet is on agents. The Swiss lab automation company has built agentic AI into Introspect, its cloud analytics platform, using NVIDIA’s BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, in an announcement on June 24 that opened early access to pharmaceutical, biotech and clinical labs. The agents watch instrument telemetry and environmental data, hunt for the patterns that…

Waters has been expanding and repositioning its mass spectrometry portfolio around the growing analytical challenges of large, heterogeneous and structurally complex drug modalities, molecules that increasingly resist full characterization by any single platform. At ASMS 2026, the company presented three complementary systems that together address this reality: the Xevo MRT P10 high-throughput discovery platform, the…

Countable Labs, a Palo Alto company built around direct single-molecule counting, has raised $26 million in an oversubscribed round to push its Countable PCR platform toward the clinic and global commercialization. Countable Labs’ twist on standard PCR doesn’t rely on microfluidics, physically isolating single DNA or RNA targets into over 30 million picoliter-sized compartments within…

Many patients who receive cancer immunotherapy do not respond to it, and oncologists still have few dependable ways to know in advance who will. By one estimate, only about 13% of all U.S. cancer patients stand to benefit from checkpoint inhibitors, and drugmakers are increasingly betting on AI to improve those odds. Noetik, a South…

The 11th BioPharma Supply Chain & Logistics Nexus runs Nov. 11-12, 2026, at the Crowne Plaza San Diego Mission Valley in California. The invitation-only event covers pharma and life-sciences supply chain operations, with sessions on cold chain logistics, temperature-controlled distribution, warehousing, inventory and procurement, alongside regulatory and sustainability topics. The format centers on executive presentations,…

NVIDIA has unveiled the BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, an open, harness-agnostic platform that gives AI agents or software platforms the building blocks to specialize for science. Debuting with adoption from nearly 50 partners, including Eli Lilly, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Dassault Systèmes, the toolkit packages NVIDIA’s life-sciences software, models for tasks such as protein-structure prediction, molecular…

Over the past decade and a half, the Darmstadt-based Merck KGaA has assembled a supplier that touches nearly every bench in the lab. It bought Millipore in 2010, with the membrane filters and Milli-Q water systems that had been lab staples since the 1950s, and added Sigma-Aldrich and its ubiquitous reagents catalog in 2015 for…

Waters Corp. (NYSE: WAT) has launched a differential scanning calorimeter built to test fully assembled coin cells, eliminating the cell teardown step that has long made DSC-based battery safety work slow and destructive. The Waters TA Instruments Coin Cell Differential Scanning Calorimeter (DSC) scans fully assembled coin cells from -80 °C to 600 °C while…

In the span of a couple of months this spring, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Benchling and a handful of startups all shipped products using some version of “AI scientist” or “co-scientist” branding. They mean fundamentally different things. Google’s Co-Scientist is a coalition of six specialized AI agents that debate and rank hypotheses in an Elo-based tournament,…

A growing number of vendors, from Google DeepMind to Benchling to traditional ELN companies like Sapio Sciences, are pitching “co-scientist” functionality to bench researchers. They are part of a multibillion-dollar wave of AI life-sciences deals that has accelerated since late 2025. To cite but a few examples, OpenAI introduced GPT-Rosalind and named Amgen, Moderna, and…

Over the past few years, consulting firms and vendors have urged life science organizations to reinvent their operations with generative AI and, more recently, with semi-autonomous agents. A February 2026 Pharmaphorum analysis by NVIDIA’s David Ruau predicted that AI scientists would become “essential collaborators” embedded across the research lifecycle as 2026 progresses. The transition remains…

In the span of several weeks this spring, every major frontier AI lab and cloud hyperscaler formally declared pharma R&D a core vertical. In April, OpenAI launched GPT-Rosalind, its frontier reasoning model series built for life sciences research, biology, and drug discovery. The ChatGPT developer also announced a significant partnership with Novo Nordisk that same…

Beckman Coulter Life Sciences has announced the commercial release of the Echo 650 Plus Series acoustic liquid handlers. The launch brings redesigned electronics, a new transducer architecture, and a 54% reduction in power consumption compared to legacy Echo instruments. According to Beckman Coulter, the core is a next-generation transducer equipped with a durable titanium lens.…

The resolution revolution in cryo-electron microscopy had reached broad recognition by 2015, when Nature Methods hailed it the method of the year and declared an end to “blob-ology,” a term structural biologist Helen Saibil recalls crystallographers once used to dismiss EM’s then low-resolution imaging. In the decade since, pharma companies have moved from cautious exploration…

The Japanese analytical and measuring instruments specialist Shimadzu launched in April the Nexis GC-2060, a flagship gas chromatograph that consolidates five injection modes and a multimode FID into the same footprint as its predecessor. The GC-2060 is the designated successor to Shimadzu’s widely installed GC-2030, and the design priorities go beyond improved detection limits. “By…

Vacuum technology keeps running into sustainability challenges. First there was a helium shortage. Then another. And another. In addition, the industry has been moving away from oil-sealed pumps and towards more sustainable methods.  Helium shortages affect lab equipment Helium shortages aren’t exactly new. The gas has been through four supply crunches since 2006, each driven…

For decades, the loudest voices against animal testing in drug development belonged to animal rights groups and organizations like PETA. The pharmaceutical industry largely tuned them out while committing to the three Rs, which include Replacement, Reduction and Refinement of preclinical testing processes. So it was striking to see FDA encouraging drug developers to plan…

Thermo Fisher Scientific has opened a flagship U.S. Bioprocess Design Center (BDC) at its Plainville, Massachusetts, site, adding 4,000 square feet of lab and training space for biologics process development. The center gives biotech and pharma customers hands-on access to Thermo Fisher’s integrated bioproduction workflow, ranging from media to cell line development to chromatography and …

The new Thermo Scientific FluidEase Pro ClipTip electronic pipettes combine a large, high-resolution touchscreen with ClipTip attachment, electronic tip ejection, Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, up to five user profiles and a modular charging stand that can support as many as four pipettes. “Lab users today grew up with smartphones,” said Joyce Ji, Director & General Manager,…

Interphex 2026 featured over 600 exhibitors at the Javits Center in New York City, taking place April 21 through 23. At the show, six technologies were awarded Interphex Exhibitor awards across various categories.  The Interphex Exhibitor Awards recognize leading vendors at the show each year for innovative, state-of-the-art technologies. The submissions are reviewed by a…

Shimadzu Scientific Instruments has introduced the Nexera X4, a new ultra-high-performance liquid chromatograph aimed labs that need faster separations without sacrificing sensitivity or using excess solvent. The system, positioned for work in pharmaceuticals, food, environmental science and chemistry, builds on its Nexera platform with a low-dispersion design meant to sharpen peaks, improve separation performance and…

With late-stage R&D costs averaging over $2 billion per asset for large biopharma companies, according to Deloitte’s ongoing analysis, and more pressure to reduce those costs, something has got to give. Jason Kelly, CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, observes that one common answer has been outsourcing, especially to lower-cost markets. But he warns that this is…

Shimadzu Scientific Instruments has introduced the Nexis GC-2060 gas chromatograph for R&D and quality control analyses in energy, chemicals, food, environmental testing and pharmaceutical applications. Marking the 70th anniversary of Shimadzu’s development of Japan’s first gas chromatograph, the new flagship GC-2060 adds upgraded Flame Ionization Detector (FID) and Thermal Conductivity Detector (TCD) detectors, a five-mode…

Seer and Precision Health Research, Singapore (PRECISE) are teaming up to run deep, unbiased plasma proteomics on 10,000 samples from the PRECISE-SG100K cohort, using Seer’s Proteograph Product Suite paired with Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Orbitrap Astral Zoom mass spectrometer. Thermo Fisher issued a parallel announcement framing the work as a strategic collaboration combining its Olink Proximity…