The Internet of Very Expensive Things

In her work as a drug researcher, Ulrike Rieder uses some of the most sophisticated and sensitive lab equipment available. But when it’s time to collate the results, she often shuttles from machine to machine gathering information. “I have to go to each piece of equipment individually to transfer the data or access each device remotely,” says Rieder, a biologist at Philochem, a Swiss biotechnology company. “It would help if all the lab equipment were somehow connected.”

There is, as they say, an app for that—and soon there will be many, as pharmaceutical companies, lab-equipment makers, and startups seek to solve the problem. While the technology in machines such as gene sequencers, centrifuges, and bioreactors keeps advancing, individual devices rarely communicate with one another. In many labs, technicians rely on screen shots, pens, and paper to share data, an inefficient process that increases the risk of mistakes. “There’s a lot of manual typing-in,” says Dana Vanderwall, an executive at drugmaker Bristol-Myers Squibb. Researchers should be able to “focus on doing science and not on the idiosyncrasies of this or that piece of equipment or this or that data format.”