Over the past two years, Boston University’s Clinical Testing Laboratory has processed an extraordinary number of COVID-19 tests—more than two million. At the pandemic’s peak, the lab’s eight state-of-the-art, liquid-handling robots—the indefatigable heart of a fully automated diagnostic facility—were running more than 6,000 tests a day, returning results in 24 hours, often less. That’s a lot of swabbed noses.

Now, with those days of regular testing at BU behind us, the multimillion dollar lab is giving its high-speed, super-efficient robots a new mission: power research from across the University.

“We have built quite a remarkable, automated lab that is virtually paper-free and is able to do a lot of sophisticated liquid-handling tasks that could be applied to any number of other research projects,” says Catherine M. Klapperich, a BU College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering, who helped build and oversee the testing facility. She says the wet lab—a space that allows scientists to study things like biological matter, chemicals, and liquids—will be open to researchers from around BU. “Most interesting to us is working with scientists on both campuses to figure out how we can leverage this facility to help people do their research faster and better.”

Today, only those who are symptomatic or were in close contact with an infected person need to swirl a COVID test swab at BU—about 100 people a day across the University’s 47,000-plus community. For a lab custom-built, seemingly overnight, to run all of those tests, it’s meant a massive reduction in demand. The robots are still ticking away, but at less than 2 percent of their peak levels.

With help from a 2022 Kilachand Fund award, the lab’s team is converting the space into a core research facility on the Charles River Campus and putting all that spare capacity to good use. It will become part of the existing Design, Automation, Manufacturing, and Processes (DAMP) Lab. The switch is being led by Klapperich and DAMP Lab director Douglas Densmore, an ENG professor of electrical and computer engineering, who also helped design and run the COVID testing lab.

The facility is what’s known as a high throughput, cloud-based lab, meaning its robots can automatically process thousands, even millions, of samples with minimal human help. Once everything is programmed, researchers have to do little more than add the starting materials and push go. As part of its launch as a COVID testing lab, BU scientists also built custom software to teach the robots what to do, and ensure they kept doing it consistently.

Klapperich says the lab is already working on a test for monkeypox, but is in what she calls the audition phase for other projects. Potential studies could include testing how cells respond to a range of therapeutics or large-scale genetics experiments—just about anything that requires a step to be repeated over and over again, says Klapperich. At the moment, many of those repetitive tasks—squirting liquid A into sample B—fall to graduate students. The techniques might be essential research skills (and long hours in the lab may be character-building), but handing them over to a robot would help reduce errors, generate greater amounts of data, and free scientists up for more creative thinking. And it might spare students from a common laboratory hazard: repetitive strain injury.

“Automation allows you to do things faster,” says Klapperich, the DAMP Lab’s research director, “and virtually eliminate those mistakes that someone would make if they were tired or dealing with a large number of samples, or even [reduce] things like variation between a plate you made up by hand in the morning versus one in the afternoon—those kinds of changes can be just because of the relative humidity, the temperature, or how you were feeling.

“The robots are always fresh and ready to go.”

Having the facility available to all will also expand wet lab access to those with no experience of running such studies. Klapperich gives the example of a computer scientist who creates a program to test—virtually—the effect of different drug structures on cells; with the converted clinical lab, they could evaluate their hypotheses in real cells.

“These instruments are flexible and powerful, and we have an opportunity to share that with the whole University,” she says. “I’m hoping we can provide a suite of services that will allow us to have a bigger impact on research at BU.”

Got an idea for a project or collaboration? Check out the DAMP Lab’s guide to pilot projects.