The Product Work Behind a More Connected Laboratory

Protect Precision Across The Workflow

Meredith Poppish, EVP of Software Division & GM, a-tune AG

I lead product for the software side of Transnetyx, so I live in the systems that surround the science: colony management, study workflows, compliance records, and the pipes that carry a genotyping result to the researcher who needs it. Researchers notice these systems when they fail, because they result in substantial operational stress for Researchers and Lab Animal Scientists. A failure in our software products operates in direct opposition to the Transnetyx vision – To give every researcher in the world the most efficient pathway to discovery.

The Lab of the Future, from my seat, is a lab where data moves seamlessly, to any required system, without routine manual reentry. The result lands in the colony record the moment it posts. The census updates itself. The audit trail holds up because the transfer can be traced. Transnetyx started by automating one painful, error-prone step, and the discipline behind that decision applies to the whole workflow.

Automated genotyping showed how reducing manual steps can support consistent results. The future lab protects precision end to end, from the sample to the colony record to the study data, because the transfer remains traceable. More consistent, traceable data can help teams identify preventable errors before they affect later work.

In short, my vision for the Lab of the Future is perhaps an unusual one for a Product professional: I want Researchers and Lab Animal Scientists to never notice our systems, because they work so well, so seamlessly, that they become invisible.

The return for Transnetyx employees like me is simple. We measure our work in hours back for science, and that number should grow every year as a direct result of efficiencies gained through Transnetyx software.

Fix The Friction Researchers Encounter

Shannan Purser, VP of Business Operations

From where I sit, the Lab of the Future isn't a single feature launch — it's what happens in the unglamorous work of making our own systems talk to each other better than they did in the past.

Right now, that means integrating platforms like Colony and tick@lab so a researcher isn't logging the same animal data twice in two different places. It means modernizing QuickOrder and tick@lab itself — not because the old versions were broken, but because "it works" and "it works well" are different standards, and researchers deserve the second one.

None of this is flashy. Nobody notices a workflow that got two clicks shorter. But that's exactly the point — the best projects are the ones researchers never have to think about, because the friction they used to hit just isn't there anymore.

Our job in project management is making sure that friction actually gets found and fixed, sprint after sprint, instead of getting talked about and quietly shelved. That's what I think the Lab of the Future really is: not one big idea, but a steady stack of smaller ones that add up to labs running the way they should have all along.

At AALAS 2026, share the handoffs and repeated tasks your team would most like to improve.