Dorna at SLAS 2026: What We Showed, What We Heard

SLAS is always one of our favorite weeks of the year — a chance to put live demos in front of the people who understand exactly what they're looking at. This year we came with two workflows running on our modular benchtop platform and an early version of Dorna Workspace. Here's what happened.

What we showed

Demo 1 — Autosampler Tube Processing

A complete autosampler workflow: random cap feeding, syringe pump dispensing, and storage — all running on a single modular benchtop platform.

Demo 2 — Falcon Tube Processing

An end-to-end falcon tube workflow: dispensing, capping and decapping, label printing, and visual inspection — sequential, automated, and running live on the floor.

Both demos ran on Dorna's modular fixture plate system, with hardware modules that snap in and out in minutes. We also showed Dorna Workspace alongside the demos — the drag-and-drop layout designer, Python scripting interface, and workflow simulation environment — giving visitors a live look at how a solution goes from concept to running system.

What we heard

The response we heard most often wasn't “impressive.” It was “we've been looking for something like this.”

Lab managers and automation leads kept describing the same problem: they knew which workflows needed to be automated, but every solution they'd evaluated was either too rigid, too expensive, or took too long to deploy. They weren't skeptical of automation — they were skeptical that a practical solution existed.

Showing them both demos live, alongside Workspace, consistently changed that. We also had strong interest from automation partners and system integrators looking for a platform to build on.

A highlight

One of the most meaningful moments of the conference was connecting with the team at Pace Analytical. Their Director of R&D, Andrea F. Gullà, Ph.D., spoke openly about how automation is already embedded in their daily lab operations — not a prototype, not a roadmap slide, but running production workflows every day. We're proud to be part of that. Read more about our collaboration →

If we didn't get to connect at SLAS — or if you want to continue a conversation we started — we'd love to hear from you.