Panel Discussion – Revised ISO Standards Improve Lab Productivity

Follow up to record breaking webinar

WESTBROOK, ME (August 9, 2022) – The Artel webinar, “New and Revised ISO Standards for Manual and Automated Liquid Handling Instruments” – the latest in a series from Artel focusing on laboratory productivity, quality, and compliance – resulted in record attendance.   Attendees posed many thoughtful and insightful questions, but the presenters didn’t have sufficient time to address all the inquiries. Therefore, a follow-up panel discussion was held on August 2nd.

The panel discussion was so well attended that it, also, exceeded the scheduled time. Attendees presented numerous questions covering a broad range of issues in their own labs, such as:

  • Why should a laboratory care about these standards, or follow them?
  • What is the difference between calibration and routine tests?
  • How do you manage assay quality if the instrument is not required to be calibrated?
  • Is it acceptable to use a pipette outside the defined volume range for which it is calibrated?
  • Does ISO 8655 require simultaneous testing of all channels in multichannel pipettes?
  • Why does ISO not define confidence intervals for measurements?
  • Does repeating a volume in multiple microtiter plate wells count as a proper replication?
  • How do maximum permissible error tables in ISO 8655 relate to finding tolerance limits for pipettes?

These and other questions were addressed by veteran experts in the world of metrology and laboratory operations, all with extensive in-lab experience with critical liquid handling workflows. Presenter Dr. George Rodrigues, Artel, has over 25 years of experience with standards development and is currently chair of the US Technical Advisory group to the ISO committee on Laboratory Equipment. George is also active with ASTM and was part of the volunteer team that developed the CLSI QMS-23 for General Laboratory Equipment.   He was joined by Dr. Bjoern Carle, Artel, who has 15 years of standards development experience and serves as chair of ASTM E41.06 for Laboratory Equipment as well as many other committee leadership roles. Bjoern was project leader for three parts of the ISO 8655 series, and for all parts of the new ISO 23783. The third panelist, John Derent, is a Global Account Manager at Artel who was formerly a Senior Scientist at Janssen (J&J). For 20 years his primary focus was automating manual processes and developing sample preparation and assay methods utilizing a variety of liquid handlers and automated platforms. John worked in small and large molecule environments in both the research and GLP areas.

Artel’s catalog of webinars and user resources is available on the website. The recording of the online panel discussion can be found here.