SLAS Europe 2022 Conference and Exhibition Award Winners Announced

Dublin, Ireland (June 2, 2022) – The Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening announced the winners of its Ignite Award, New Product Awards and Student Poster Awards at the SLAS Europe 2022 Conference and Exhibition in Dublin on Thursday, May 26.

Shinephi, a spin-off of The Institute of Photonic Sciences (Barcelona, Spain), won the SLAS Ignite Award and will receive €5,000 plus opportunities for ongoing publicity and collaboration with the SLAS community. . Shinephi’s goal is to revolutionize live-cell imaging with its ultra-sensitive and easy-to-integrate phase-imaging technology, allowing users to image beyond their current capabilities and expand their range of applications.

“We are very happy about the great support and visibility that this award brings. At the same time, we are super happy about the connections, interactions and positive feedback that we got during this event,” said Roland Terborg, Ph.D. (Shinephi).

The Ignite Award is presented to the “most promising” start-up chosen to exhibit within Innovation AvewNEW, a special section of the exhibition reserved for emerging life sciences and technology companies. Each company that opts-in to compete for the Ignite Award is judged by an SLAS panel on a combination of key concepts, including their marketing plan, market presence and potential, funding prospects, plan for growth and the existence of balanced company leadership, among other qualities.

This year’s New Product Award winners are CELLINK for BIO CELLX and Tecan for MagicPrep NGS.

CELLINK, based in Gothenburg, Sweden, won for BIO CELLX – a high-throughput and fully automated bio dispenser that leverages bioprinting on-demand technology with preset and pre-validated protocols that help bench scientists produce 3D cellular models with minimal effort. The BIOCELLX includes pre-loaded detailed plans that allow for a wide variety of dispensing options and step-by-step protocols that assist in a more efficient transition to 3D cell culturing.

Tecan (Männedorf, Switzerland) won for its MagicPrep NGS, a fully automated and reproducible workflow for NGS library systems. The MagicPrep NGS system includes all reagents and consumables already pre-aliquoted in a single kit, which significantly reduces prep time in the lab.

Each year at the SLAS Europe Conference and Exhibition, the New Product Award is given to up to three companies showcasing new products that are commercially available within 90 days pre- and post-conference. Products are evaluated by a judging panel onsite at the companies’ booths. Winning products are granted use of the New Product Award designation for a year and are promoted through SLAS’s multi-channel communications.

Finally, two Student Poster Award winners were named, with each winner taking home €500.

Winston Chiu, Ph.D. Student (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) won with his poster, “The Caps-It, a Multi-Purpose Fully Automated Lab-in-a-Box System in the Fight Against Current and Future Pandemics.” The second winner was Srijit Seal, Ph.D. Student (University of Cambridge) for his poster, “Biological Interpretation of Cell Painting and Gene Expression Features for Mitochondrial Toxicity Prediction.”

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This year, SLAS held the SLAS Europe 2022 Conference and Exhibition at the Royal Dublin Society in Dublin, Ireland, 25-27 May after conducting a fully virtual conference in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 1,000 scientists, academicians, technology providers and business leaders attended the hybrid annual conference, which includes educational programming focused on life sciences discovery and laboratory automation . The Exhibition portion of the conference hosts more than 100 leading companies from around the world and showcases the latest in technologies for the life sciences.

SLAS (the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening) is an international community of more than 19,000 individual scientists, engineers, researchers, technology providers and related professionals from academic, government and commercial research laboratories. The SLAS mission is to be the preeminent global organization providing forums for education and information exchange and to encourage the study of and improve the practice of life sciences discovery and technology. For more information visit www.SLAS.org or contact SLAS Global Headquarters at +1.877.990.SLAS (5727) or e-mail slas@slas.org.

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