The afternoon programme on Stage 1 asked what happens after laboratories connect their instruments, pipelines and algorithms: who validates them, who secures them, and who answers to the auditor when they are wrong.
DUBAI, 26 October 2026 — If the opening morning of ARABLAB LIVE 2026 was about accreditation, the afternoon on Stage 1, the conference’s Digital Labs track at the Dubai World Trade Centre, examined the cost side of the digital laboratory. A run of panels and presentations took up the problems that tend to arrive only after a laboratory has bought its automation: cybersecurity, the validation of software and bioinformatics pipelines, the governance of artificial intelligence, and the compliance burden of keeping every result traceable.
Securing the connected laboratory
The track’s first afternoon session, at 12:40, was a panel titled “Securing automated labs: technology integration, innovation integrity, and cyber risk prevention.” It was moderated by Moh’d GH Moh’d Moh’d, Associate Professor of Medical Laboratory Sciences at the University of Sharjah, and brought together Anu Surendran, Quality Manager at Dubai Police HQ, with two Unilabs leaders: Rim Hajbi, Laboratory Manager, and Shaymaa AlHamami, Laboratory Director.
The pairing of a police quality manager with private diagnostic laboratory managers is instructive. Modern analysers, liquid handlers, balances and chromatography data systems increasingly sit on networks and report directly to laboratory information systems. Each connection adds convenience and an entry point. For a clinical laboratory, a compromised network threatens patient results and turnaround times; for a forensic laboratory, it threatens something harder to restore, the chain of custody on which evidence depends. Regulators already expect laboratory records to be attributable, legible, contemporaneous, original and accurate, a set of data-integrity principles widely abbreviated as ALCOA. Cybersecurity is increasingly the practical test of whether those principles hold.
When the pipeline is the instrument
At 13:10, Ahmed Omar, a bioinformatics expert at the General Department of Forensic Science and Criminology of Dubai Police HQ, presented “Automating the lab for genomic data analysis: challenges of validating, analysis pipelines and output data.”
The subject addresses a gap that conventional laboratory quality systems were not designed for. In genomic testing, the sequencer produces raw data, but the reported result is shaped by a chain of software: alignment tools, variant callers, reference databases and filtering thresholds. A change in any link, including a routine software update or a new reference build, can alter outputs. Accreditation frameworks therefore increasingly treat the bioinformatics pipeline as part of the validated method itself, requiring laboratories to document versions, test performance against reference samples and revalidate after changes. For forensic identification, where results must withstand cross-examination, that discipline is not optional.
AI, trust and the regulator
The 13:30 panel, “AI for trust, discovery and decision making: transforming how laboratories generate, interpret, and act on data in the Gulf,” was moderated by Tasneem Taherali. Its speakers were Prof. Amjad Gawanmeh of the University of Dubai; Dheepa Manoharan, Head of Thumbay Laboratory Operations and Quality at Thumbay Labs; Dr. Khushbu Piyushkumar, a laboratory director and pathologist and founding CEO of Revital Rehabilitation Hospital and the Global Healthcare Quality Academy; Mohamed Al Musleh, Associate Professor of Product Innovation at Heriot-Watt University Dubai; and Tunc Koscagiz, Founder and General Manager of Scientia Link, the event’s Silver Sponsor.
A related question followed at 15:00, when Dr. Waleed Elghannam, Laboratory Director at Khorfakkan Municipality, Sharjah Government, presented a compliance and internal-auditing machine-learning framework for GAHAR clinical laboratory standards. GAHAR, Egypt’s General Authority for Healthcare Accreditation and Regulation, sets the national accreditation standards for that country’s healthcare facilities. The premise of the talk, using machine learning to support auditing rather than to generate results, reflects a quieter use of AI that may prove easier to deploy in regulated settings than diagnostic algorithms, because a human auditor remains accountable for the finding.
Traceability, calibration and the water grid
At 15:20, Mohamed Nabil Mohamed, Senior Vice President for Water Quality and Integrity at the Emirates Water and Electricity Company (EWEC), joined Ms. Taherali for an interview titled “Digital traceability and smart calibration: how data, sensors, and AI are reshaping measurement science.” In metrology, traceability means that a measurement can be related to a reference, ultimately the International System of Units, through an unbroken, documented chain of calibrations, each with a stated uncertainty. As utilities move from periodic laboratory sampling to continuous online sensors, keeping that chain intact across thousands of distributed instruments becomes a data-management problem as much as a calibration one.
LIMS moves to the centre
Software vendors used the stage to argue that the laboratory information management system (LIMS) is becoming the laboratory’s operating system. At 15:40, Jason Jones, Vice President and General Manager of LIMS at Instem, the event’s Gold Sponsor, presented “Beyond sample tracking: how modern LIMS is transforming laboratory operations.” Instem is exhibiting its Matrix Gemini LIMS at stand AH-G32, a platform the company describes as covering data collection, storage and reporting across workflows including stability studies and client sample testing, with audit-trail features intended to support compliance with the US FDA’s 21 CFR Part 11 rules on electronic records and signatures.
At 16:00, Dr. Dina Al Nuaimi, Senior Pharmacist in the Policies and Standards function of the Hospital Department at Emirates Health Services, addressed the convergence of digitalisation, efficiency and audit readiness in pharmaceutical testing environments, the point at which digital systems are judged not by speed but by whether an inspector can reconstruct who did what, and when.
Competition in laboratory informatics is visible on the exhibition floor. LabWare Arabia and LabVantage Solutions are both listed exhibitors and are scheduled to present on Tuesday’s Lab Innovations seminar programme.
The common thread
Taken together, the Digital Labs sessions described an industry past the novelty stage of automation. The open questions are no longer whether laboratories should connect instruments, deploy algorithms or move records into software, but how they will prove to regulators, courts and patients that the resulting numbers are secure, validated and traceable. For many laboratories in the region, those answers will shape procurement as much as instrument specifications do.
