Leica Biosystems has launched the HistoCore LIGHTNING C Laser Cassette Printer globally, with a stated printing time of 2.5 seconds per cassette and capacity for up to 600 cassettes. The Danaher company, the parent of Leica Biosystems, announced the system Sept. 16 for pathology labs seeking to automate specimen labeling and tracking. Histology cassettes hold…
Thermo Fisher launches 250-liter, stackable environmental chambers
Thermo Fisher Scientific debuted 250-liter Heratherm environmental chambers. expanding its laboratory equipment lineup with smaller, stackable models for stability testing, cell culture and sample storage. The chambers complement the company’s existing 750-liter versions. The smaller format allows labs to stack units for simultaneous testing under different environmental conditions or for long-term studies, according to Thermo…
Upcoming Solstice webinar to examine hidden sources of lab variability
In a survey of more than 1,000 laboratory personnel across five countries, quality, safety, and purity emerged as the leading considerations when purchasing research chemicals. Cost ranked near the bottom, according to findings previously presented by Honeywell’s research chemicals business, now part of Solstice Advanced Materials. Those priorities pave the way to a larger operational…
The Practical Blueprint for Delivering Flexible, Competitive Labs
Delivering laboratory buildings within tight budgets remains a challenge, particularly for developer-led projects where cost certainty is critical. Early planning decisions shape upfront costs and long-term adaptability. Establishing parameters early helps control capital investment without limiting future usability. Integrating cost estimation consultants, construction managers, and general contractors early in the design process is a key…
Norstella launches Atlas, a biopharma agentic platform that can ‘train you’
Enterprise software in drug development tends to arrive slowly. Laboratory information management systems, quality platforms and the enterprise resource planning software they connect to typically take months to deploy. In Panorama Consulting Group’s 2026 ERP report, based on 170 organizations across industries surveyed between January 2025 and January 2026, the median project ran nine months,…
Shimadzu updates triple-quadrupole GC-MS line with new detector, multimode inlet
Shimadzu has introduced the new triple-quadrupole GC-MS platform offers an optional multimode inlet and, on the higher-end GCMS-TQ8050 RX, a newly developed detector designed to reduce noise in trace analysis. Shimadzu says the new series delivers up to 25% higher sensitivity than previous models, while faster inlet cooling cuts maintenance waiting time from 40 minutes…
HORIBA launches combined particle size and shape analyzer
After nearly four decades of developing laser diffraction particle analyzers, HORIBA is repositioning Partica, the brand that has covered its LA-series instruments, around analyzing particle size and shape in a single workflow. The new Partica system combines laser diffraction with dynamic image analysis. HORIBA says the approach gives materials researchers and manufacturers both sets of…
As AI floods drug discovery with designs, Twist uses DNA chips to tackle the wet-lab bottleneck
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…
How Tecan uses NVIDIA’s BioNeMo Agent Toolkit to flag lab risks before runs fail
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 targets large, heterogeneous drug modalities with three new mass spectrometry systems
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’ CTO Christina Fan on reimagining PCR, one molecule at a time
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…
Noetik’s TARIO-2: A ‘world model’ that reads a tumor from a single slide
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…
BioPharma Supply Chain & Logistics Nexus returns to San Diego in November
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 Announces BioNeMo Agent Toolkit with traction from nearly 50 partners, including Lilly, Thermo Fisher and Dassault
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…
MilliporeSigma’s CTO on AI retrosynthesis, the Merck KGaA–Siemens deal and the chemistry that runs the autonomous lab
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 targets earlier thermal runaway detection with whole-cell coin cell differential scanning calorimeter
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…
Benchling bets lab automation can ground AI co-scientists in the physical world
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,…
For AI co-scientists to scale, scientists have to trust them. The architectural bets to earn it vary.
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…
Pistoia Alliance on why 69% of life sciences firms can’t measure AI’s impact, and the architectural shift that could change that
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…
AI co-scientist startup CTO on ‘hypothesis slop,’ deterministic code and the goal of compressing a century of science into a decade
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 introduces Echo 650 Plus Series featuring updated electronics and 54% lower power consumption
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.…
Thermo Fisher’s South San Francisco cryo-EM center offers drug developers a proving ground for structure-guided discovery
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…
Shimadzu dishes on the GC-2030’s successor, a flagship gas chromatograph built around fewer configuration
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…
Helium shortage puts lab vacuum technology under pressure
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…
When can organoids help pharma make the leap from mice to human biology?
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…
























