How Connected Systems Can Support the Lab of the Future 

A Future We Can Build Together

Bob Bean, President & CEO

Sometimes seeing the future is an exercise in dreaming and imagining, and inventing. That seems simple, but with perseverance, it can lead to reality. You have to find a solid, starting place.

This year at AALAS in Houston, Transnetyx is offering a concept of the possible. A way of considering what we can do together to move our industry forward by embracing operational excellence at a new level.

When companies combine efforts to help the world of animal research be more efficient with staff, accomplish more research in our labs, and use fewer animals all in one motion, it is a tall task. But it is one that can help us all realize the possibilities for the future.

This year, Transnetyx is joining together with Allentown (Animal Housing), RapID Lab (QR Code Ear Tags), and PicoTeam (Digital Cage Cards) to demonstrate what integrated systems bring to the operational world our customers manage every day. With dozens or even hundreds of labs, thousands of strains and projects, and thousands of cages, the management of those competing and sometimes chaotic workspaces can make order and efficiency seem implausible. Sometimes leaders rule out whole areas of development due to obvious constraints.

What if those constraints weren’t the gating factor? What if the tools needed to make inroads into this level of animal welfare and reduction of animals were possible? What if the future was now? Could we grab it? Could we see it in reality? Is there anything we can do to usher this in?

At Transnetyx we believe the collective power of technological integration is that future and is that reality. And we believe that it can be put in the hands of animal research facility leaders to implement.

Innovation is the key to change. Change is happening all around us, whether we like it or not. In this part of the science world, adoption of new methods faces significant resistance. Often, labs are not receptive to any interference in their world of discovery, even though it would be beneficial. But the value of invention can yield real and tangible results for them today that technology would not allow 5 years ago. We can deliver, through the combined efforts of these companies, efficiency that literally empowers more science- reproducible science- while spending less on animal costs.

It is the way forward. It is exciting. It is possible and it can be experienced. What a great time to be alive and able to see the edge of the future that will drive more science leading to more cures and treatments that help end suffering and improve lives. At AALAS, we hope you will join us for this experience and step into that world yourself.

Each visitor will not only see it but experience the future firsthand. And our hope is that it will empower you to dream and help us all develop even more possibilities for a better future.

Connectivity Researchers Can Trust

Joel Schwalbe, CTO

The Lab of the Future isn't just automated — it's connected. Universities run on a patchwork of platforms: LIMS, ELNs, spreadsheets, animal management systems, and countless department-specific applications that rarely talk to each other. Transnetyx is working toward connections among these systems, with tick@lab supporting animal research operations alongside other institutional systems.

That connectivity only matters if it's trustworthy. Every integration point is a place where data can be delayed, duplicated, or lost — so our job is to make sure it isn't. That means secure, resilient infrastructure behind every connection, so researchers get accurate data without wondering where it came from. That same reliability lets us extend confidently into machine learning and AI-driven workflows — surfacing patterns faster than manual review could, with human checkpoints built in so researchers stay in control.

Visit Transnetyx at AALAS 2026 to explore the Lab of the Future and discuss the systems supporting your research.

Strengthen The Systems Beneath Science

Andy Keys, CCO

Ask ten researchers what the "lab of the future" looks like, and you'll likely get ten different answers — more automation, cleaner data, fewer manual steps, faster results. But underneath all of those answers is the same idea: the future of research isn't a shiny, distant destination. It's a laboratory that works smarter, today, so scientists can spend less time managing logistics and more time discovering.

That future isn't abstract. It's already being built — one workflow, one dataset, one returned hour at a time.

Science Is Accelerating. The Systems Beneath It Have to Keep Up.

Discovery has never moved faster. New models, new modalities, and new questions are emerging faster than most laboratory operations were ever built to support. That's precisely the tension at the heart of the Lab of the Future: the science is evolving quickly, and the infrastructure underneath it has to evolve just as quickly — while maintaining reliable core processes. 

That means two things have to be true at once. Laboratories still need the same solid core processes they've always relied on: accurate sample tracking, well-managed colony data, and dependable, clean results. Those fundamentals don't become optional just because the pace of discovery has picked up — they're what the next generation of research gets built on. At the same time, that infrastructure has to be flexible enough to adapt, scale, and support discoveries that don't exist yet. 

Science and technology have to grow together. A lab that only modernizes its tools without strengthening its core processes builds on a shaky foundation. A lab that keeps its core processes airtight but never adapts gets left behind by the pace of its own research. The Lab of the Future does both — it's rooted in the fundamentals and built to evolve. 

What Becomes Possible When a Lab Works Smarter

Picture a facility where sample tracking is automated instead of manual, genotyping results arrive accurately and on a predictable timeline, and data flows cleanly from the bench to the researcher's desktop with fewer manual transfers. What feels different isn't one dramatic change — it's the absence of a hundred small frustrations that used to eat into the day.

That's what becomes possible when a laboratory works smarter: fewer manual processes, fewer errors to chase down, and more hours returned to the work that matters. As research grows more complex and collaborative — spanning institutions, countries, and disciplines — trusted, reproducible, traceable data becomes non-negotiable. Precision compounds; it's the foundation that lets researchers move forward with confidence instead of doubt. The most effective labs of the future won't just have more data. They'll have trustworthy data, delivered through workflows built specifically for the realities of research, not retrofitted from generic tools.

Precision, Welfare, and the Evolving Role of Animal Research

Nowhere is that balance between "rooted" and "ready" clearer than in animal research facilities. The 3Rs — replacement, reduction, and refinement of animal use — have long shaped how responsible research is designed and conducted, and that commitment isn't going anywhere. If anything, it's becoming more central as facilities face greater scrutiny and higher expectations for animal welfare.

At the same time, the research landscape is expanding around it. New approach methodologies, or NAMs — in vitro assays, organ-on-a-chip systems, computational and AI-driven models — are opening up complementary paths that can reduce and refine how animals are used without compromising scientific rigor. The Lab of the Future doesn't treat the 3Rs and emerging methodologies as separate tracks. It treats them as part of the same commitment: doing the best possible science while continually asking how it can be done more responsibly.

Making good on that commitment takes more than intention — it takes clarity into what's actually happening across the facility. When facility staff, researchers, and compliance teams can see animal availability, colony data, and study activity in one place, they can make faster, more informed decisions that support the 3Rs in practice, not just on paper.

This is exactly the problem a-tune's tick@lab software was built to solve — and where its trajectory points next. By bringing research compliance, animal care, and facility operations together on a single platform, tick@lab already gives every stakeholder a shared, accurate view of what's happening across the vivarium. What's emerging is bigger than that: tick@lab is positioned to become the central hub for animal research, compliance, and animal facility management — the connective layer where information from other support systems flows into one place instead of living in disconnected silos. Administrators, compliance staff, researchers, veterinarians, and animal care teams working from a single, trusted source of truth, instead of piecing one together themselves. That kind of connectivity doesn't just reduce administrative burden; it can support more timely research decisions. It actively supports the 3Rs by making animal use, availability, and welfare visible across the whole facility, not buried in spreadsheets only one department can see.

Where Transnetyx Fits In

This is the work Transnetyx and a-tune do every day: helping research teams build laboratories that are more efficient, more accurate, more connected, and more ready for what's next. From high-throughput genotyping to streamlined sample management, connected systems and centralized reporting like tick@lab, and reliable data delivery, the goal has never been to make research more complicated — it's to make the operational side of science disappear into the background, so researchers can focus on the questions that matter.

Ask what researchers are spending time on today that better workflows could take off their plates, and the answer is rarely glamorous: manual data entry, redundant testing, chasing documentation across systems that don't talk to each other. Those are exactly the processes that will look different five or ten years from now — and exactly the processes Transnetyx and a-tune are already reshaping today.

What the Lab of the Future Gives Back

Ultimately, the Lab of the Future isn't about the lab at all. It's about the researcher. It's about giving scientists back the time, confidence, and clarity that manual, disconnected processes have quietly been taking away for years.

Your research is constantly moving forward. Your laboratory should be moving with it — not someday, but now. The future of research isn't waiting to arrive. It's being built into every workflow, every dataset, and every hour returned to the people doing the science.

Welcome to a future with fewer manual steps and more time for science. It's closer than you think — and it starts with the systems supporting your lab today.