NHS Foundation Trust signs collaboration agreement to automate laboratories

Automata has announced a commercial collaboration with University Hospital Southampton (UHS) NHS Foundation Trust, to accelerate automation within laboratories, enhance patient care, and reduce overall pressure on scientists and NHS services.

The partnership follows the successful automation within the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Saliva Testing Laboratory in 2020, to support testing during the COVID-19 pandemic, and clear the diagnostic backlog.

During this time, Automata’s technology aided the scaling of the Trust’s ability to carry out up to tens of thousands of tests per day, and laboratory staff were able to run up to forty robots at once to process tests from a single iPad.

Martin Gossling, Head of Commercial Innovation at UHS, shared: “A key legacy of delivering saliva testing as part of the national COVID-19 response has been how we can apply the automation of processes on a wider scale across the clinical sector. Partnering with Automata has allowed us to combine our knowledge of laboratory work and access to it, with their technological solutions that will ultimately result in more efficient processes at scale that will benefit the NHS and the patients we serve.”

Automata is a London based biotech company, providing robotic automation solutions to the life sciences industry. The company is partnering with the UHS NHS Foundation Trust, exploring future clinical use cases in other areas of laboratory medicine.

Mostafa ElSayed, CEO & CoFounder Automata also commented: “It’s fantastic to be partnering with the NHS to demonstrate how our technology can answer the need for exceptionally reliable solutions that enable scalability, enhance capacity, and empower over-stretched workforces. The whole team at Automata are proud to be helping our amazing NHS scientists achieve better results faster with worry-free lab automation from Automata Labs.”