Keynote Speaker: Donald G. Patterson Jr.
How to Implement and Profit from a Successful Laboratory Automation Program

In order to have enough statistical power in epidemiological studies, it is necessary to measure environmental toxicants in large numbers of human samples. It is not uncommon to need several thousand samples to be able to have an acceptable amount of power to find any potential association between human toxicant levels and human health effects.

There are a number of factors that must be considered in designing these studies. One of the most important is the ability to measure toxicants in a large number of human samples. This requires that analytical methods be highly automated in order to complete the study in a timely manner. The high throughput also is required to reduce the cost of performing the large numbers of measurements. The automation also allows the measurement of quality control and quality assessment samples in a cost effective manner. The automated system must be highly reliable and rugged to minimize the loss of precious and in most cases, irreplaceable samples.

Another factor that must be considered is the ability to measure as many chemicals from a single sample as possible. The demand for the measurement of more and more analytes from a single sample has increased steadily over the past 20 years. This demand is driven by studies that are identifying new and emerging contaminants in human matrices. Participants in human studies are reluctant to give large amounts of blood and therefore, more and more chemicals must be measured from a single sample. In addition, it is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain large amounts of blood from young children, the elderly, and people who are sick. This increase in demand for adding new analytes to the methods requires that the automated systems be flexible and capable of fractionating the sample extracts into separate extracts for eventual analytical measurement. These systems must be flexible enough to allow the addition of new analytes to the extraction, clean-up, and fractionation procedures.

This seminar is designed to provide a forum for the presentation of the most recent sample preparation technology as applied to environmental and human matrices in a number of laboratories from around the World.