Welcome to the next version of Voices of Sample Management. Today, I have my friend and colleague, fellow product manager at Titian, Marcus Oxer. Can you please introduce yourself?

Marcus Oxer
Yeah, thank you. Toby. Yes, I'm Marcus Oxer, and as you just said, I'm a product manager at Titian Software. So part of it, the product team. This year, sorry, this month, I'm celebrating my 12th anniversary at Titian, which has gone remarkably quickly. But prior to Titian, which seems like a long time ago now, I was a scientist at GlaxoSmithKline. I originally started there as a bench scientist, as a molecular biologist.

So I worked in the lab for the first probably six or seven years, and then I sort of moved more into the IT side of things. So I was working initially in bioinformatics and then later on in R&D IT, so always staying in touch with the science, but moving progressively more into this IT side of things.

So yeah, joining Titian from there was a logical step. Titian was a company were working with a lot. And of course I still hear from time to time, I get to talk to my old colleagues back in my former pharma days.

Toby Winchester
Cool, thank you. So with the idea of this podcast is to share the knowledge of sample management, but also observations of what happens in the outside world. There's a lot of focus on sustainability and the carbon neutral world that we are all supposed to be aiming for. So we thought we'd have a discussion about how this is important, but also how sample management can help over that journey.

So with things like COP23, COP24 happening, lots of horrible TV programmes of sea turtles with plastic bags around their head etc., it's getting more and more important in people's minds. And whether that leads individuals to reuse their plastic drinking cup or turning off lights, all these things are good, but more importantly, what are the big pharma companies actually doing, Marcus?

Marcus Oxer
Well, indeed it's a huge topic, isn't it? In our faces the whole time on radio, television, the internet.

The big pharma companies and also academia are doing a lot in this area. We know that AstraZeneca, for example, has this huge ambition zero carbon strategy where they're aiming to eliminate CO2 emissions, be carbon neutral by 2025, which is a huge ambitious target to aim for. GSK, my former company wanted to do a hundred percent renewable energy by 2025, including imported and generated. And I'm sure the other big pharma have similar goals.

On the academic side, I know there's this UCL, which is University College London, one of the biggest universities in the UK, have this laboratory efficiency assessment framework, which is LEAF as an acronym. And that's tries to look at all areas across an organisation, the laboratory organisational structure including equipment management, recycling, procurement, with the aim of just driving down energy consumption and increasing sustainability, reducing wastage and all those sorts of things.

But I know there are other universities creating their own pledges, University of Leeds, I think were aiming to be plastic free on their campuses by 2023. So yeah, there's a lot going on in these different industries and in academia.

Toby Winchester
I suppose the world of sample management, it might be quite hard to figure out how we can help this process. We all have lots of plastic tubes with barcodes on disposable tips, et cetera, and lots of laboratory freezers. Maybe we should start with something as energy using as a laboratory freezer.

Marcus Oxer
Yeah, so freezers, I mean it's astonishing really just how much energy a freezer uses. I mean, we're talking in laboratory, frequently talking about minus 80 freezers, which of course, to get down to those sorts of temperatures, inevitably it's a lot of energy usage and typically they use something like close to I think 7,000 kilowatt hours a year, which if you break it down, it's about as much as a house consumes.

Toby Winchester
That's a house per year basically.

Marcus Oxer
Yes.

Toby Winchester
In your lab.

Marcus Oxer
Yeah. So it's like having, each freezer represents the energy usage of a whole house in terms of electricity. And of course, companies have dozens of these, many large companies have many dozens of freezers. So it does really represent a huge carbon footprint potentially.

Now, obviously, you can offset that to some extent by using renewable energy where you can, but still better would be to get away with fewer freezers if you can reduce your freezer footprint.

Toby Winchester
So I suppose that leads nicely into sample management software, could potentially help?

Marcus Oxer
Indeed, indeed. And actually we mentioned AstraZeneca earlier and their sort of zero carbon targets, and there was somebody I met at AstraZeneca who was talking to me about this very subject and he was very aware that they have a lot of freezers and was very much aware of the impact that must be having both in terms of financial costs but also carbon cost.

And the conversation was all about tracking, knowing what's in those freezers because it's very possible that, as I say, I was a bench scientist, I know this, you have freezers, they fill up with things, you don't necessarily know what's in there and whether it's okay to dispose of it. It might be something really important so you don't want to get rid of it. So the simplest thing is just buy another freezer.

We do the same sort of thing in our houses, don't we? We tend not to throw things away. We accumulate. It's easier to accumulate things than declutter. And it's the same with lab freezers. So unless you've got a really good idea of what's in your freezers, it's hard to keep on top of your disposal regimes.

And that's where sample management of course can help because if you can properly catalogue everything in your freezer and perhaps even do things like assign expiry dates or at least review dates, so you know something needs to be reviewed, is this project still relevant? If the project's closed, you can consider whether to dispose of it and free up all those spaces for new samples without having to resort to buying more freezers.

Toby Winchester
And running them of course, yes.

Marcus Oxer
Yes. So generally getting by with fewer freezes clearly is going to be a huge benefit. And some things, some samples just have a shelf life that beyond which you don't want to keep them anyway. But if you're not tracking that and regularly reviewing it, then it's hard to do that.

You don't have to be digging through your freezer looking for samples, but if you can just do a search and say, which of my samples have expired and where are they? And then go and pick them out, obviously that's a much easier proposition than trying to figure it out with a spreadsheet or just go digging around in a frosty freezer.

Toby Winchester
Okay, cool. Of course, even a software system needs power to run, so we're not immune to this process, but what can a software company like us do?

Marcus Oxer
Well, one way is to go with economies of scale. So by using external hosting rather than trying to run software in a local data centre can have a dramatic effect on total energy consumption.

So Titian uses Amazon web hosting, which means that you can be optimising your compute usage. It scales according to your usage, but also lots of the AWS hubs that we use for hosting can be run on renewable energy.

And indeed we seek to use the ones that are run on renewable energy just to help with everyone's carbon footprint concerns because obviously these companies that are trying to reduce their carbon footprint, that does extend across their whole value chain. So including the providers of software services as well, which Titian may be one.

Toby Winchester
So yeah, I suppose we've covered a bit of what Titian does. As the automation product manager, I suppose we should probably have a quick discussion on what the other vendors are up to.

So they're having done a bit of Googling and talking to partner vendors. It's interesting that most of the big companies, the Beckmans, the Tecans, et cetera, have similar goals to the big pharma. They're all big companies and they have shareholders who care about the future of the world.

So there's obviously a good incentive to do it. For instance, Tecan aims to use a hundred percent renewable just like GSK by 2025. Beckman have reduced their non-hazardous landfill by 73% and that was in 2021. And lots of their plants in San Jose and Indianapolis use a hundred percent renewable energy.

And even the small companies such as Ziath reduce their carbon emissions by half by sticking solar panels on the roof of their facility and actually pay to offset per year to cover the rest. So even the smaller vendors are doing their bit.

I also know Ziath are very focused on using unlabeled packaging, so it can be reused easily. It can be recycled easily. So they're going even another step, none of their packaging comes Ziath stamped on the side. It's just got a sticky label on it, which can be removed easily.

Okay. Do you think there's anything else we should bring up?

Marcus Oxer
Yeah, so we are talking about automation because we're starting to stray into the, and we've been talking about energy usage and we're now starting to cross over into the topic of plastic usage across all these pipetting operations, use tips and plates and so on.

And usually when you talk about trying to minimise your impact, you think about things like reduce, reuse, recycle, not very easy with laboratory plastics because reducing is one option. You can do things like by minimise the number of plates you use by either using scaled down formats, more wells, more densely packed wells, or potentially running more assays on the same plate, things like multiplexing or making sure you are not running partial plates.

And that's something that obviously Mosaic has an assay request queue to help you do exactly that sort of thing.

So you can only plate out items when you have sufficient to plate onto full plates. So avoid partial plates and that can as well as reducing the number of plates you're using because that can have other knock-on effects such as time savings. So you're saving on time and equipment which could have a carbon impact.

If your plate's being prepared externally, which is often the case, you have bigger companies often have CROs preparing these assay plates for them, you're potentially reducing the shipping burden as well and fewer plates. And then recycling always been a challenge.

I mean, going right back to my years at pharma industry, I remember when everything was glass and we used glass pipettes and glass flasks and so on. And we used to have a very nice man who used to come around and collect all the glassware.

I remember him particularly, he was very friendly chap seemed to love his job, and his job was to come and collect the glassware, wash it, autoclave it, return it to the labs, and that was the norm.

And then we gradually switched over to using plastics. I remember even at the time I thought, this just seems incredibly wasteful, we're filling bins with plastic pipettes during the day, and then go off to the, again, autoclaved before disposal, presumably either landfill or incineration.

And I think there is now a recognition that sort of model of plastic usage has got to come back a little bit. And I talked a bit earlier about the different academic frameworks reducing plastic usage. And I know the University of Leeds, for example, have been looking in their labs and seeing what alternatives they can find.

And it is ironically, some of the things going back to glass, so glass petri dishes rather than plastic petri dishes. But things like weighing boats for weighing out powders can be paper rather than plastic.

But generally one of the problems with plastic is you can't easily recycle it. It generally does have to for incineration or landfill because by definition it's probably contaminated. And even if it's not contaminated, it's just been used for some fairly benign solution such as glucose solution. Most recycling companies I think would treat it with some suspicion if it's come from a laboratory.

There are some companies out there starting to appear that are looking to washing and reusing plastic labware, which is a very interesting development. It'd be interesting to see if that really does take off as another option for reducing wastage.

Toby Winchester
Yeah, I've heard of plasma cleaners and things like that. It's interesting technology and I think a few of the farmer have tried, but yeah, I haven't actually heard of positive or negative yet, but hopefully it'll evolve.

Marcus Oxer
It sounds like the right sort of thing, doesn't it? At least to investigate these options, it's difficult to imagine you can have a 1536 well plate in glass, for example, but you could imagine it might be possible to find a way of reusing those plates.

Toby Winchester
Yes, that would be the ideal. Yes. The utopia.

Marcus Oxer
Because the other thing worth mentioning, I suppose I mentioned pipette tips and because now a plethora of tipless dispensing liquid handling options. So that's another way of reducing plastic usage by not requiring tips at all.

Toby Winchester
Yes. Or at least minimising. Some dispensers don't need to change the tip each time. You can load it up and reuse the same tip quite a while. So there's different technologies out there. It's not just the acoustic dispensers, it's SPT type machines, also dragon flies and things use a different type of pipetting so they can do multiple dispenses from the same tip. Yeah. So interesting times ahead, but it's obviously important.

Marcus Oxer
Yes.

Toby Winchester
Okay. Thank you, Marcus. That's good. And thank you audience for listening into the latest Voices of Sample Management. See you next time.

Marcus Oxer
Thank you, Toby