Paperless laboratories do better science
At the Paperless Lab Academy (PLA), which took place in Amsterdam on 13 and 14 May, the importance of managing change and the limits to data sharing were important topics. Tom Wilkie reports
G
ayle Dagnell, of the contract research organisation Evotec, summed up a central message of the Paperless Lab Academy (PLA), when she observed:
‘People initially did not want to change.’ But aſter implementation of a new informatics system within the organisation: ‘100 per cent said they did not want to go back to the old way of doing things’. As the PLA’s chairman Peter Boogaard
remarked, the comment encapsulated the theme of the meeting – that in moving from a paper-based to a paperless laboratory, successful implementation depends as much on successful ‘change management’ among the staff affected by the move as on the details of the technology itself. Te point was endorsed in the keynote address
by Lawrence Barrett, programme director of Digital R&D at Unilever. But he also had some unexpected messages. When introducing a new informatics system, it is as important to get ‘buy-in’ from senior managers as from the scientists at the laboratory bench, he told the meeting. During the initial phase, people naturally find it takes longer to work with a new,
Dassault Systèmes launches Biovia
Following its acquisition of Accelrys in February, Dassault Systèmes has brought together all its life science activities under the single brand of ‘Biovia’.
The new brand is a combination of Dassault Systèmes’ own activities in BioIntelligence, its collaborative 3DExperience technologies, and the life sciences and material sciences applications from the recent acquisition of Accelrys.
Biovia will focus on biological,
unfamiliar system rather than the old way of working which they know well. So lab scientists, faced with a need to complete assays quickly to meet production deadlines, might well suggest short-cuts to their managers. Managers too will be under pressure to ensure that deadlines are met. It is an understandable reaction to resolve the dilemma by agreeing that the scientists can work round the new systems and revert to the old methods. But the unintended consequence of a decision taken in good faith to fulfil the short-term priority can be slippage in the longer-term priority – even though that will eventually save the company money and improve efficiency in the future. So part of the successful implementation of a new electronic lab notebook
20 PER CENT OF EXPERIMENTS WERE PRODUCING DATA THAT WAS RE-USED LATER ELSEWHERE IN THE ORGANISATION
chemical, and materials modelling and simulation, research and open collaborative discovery, enterprise laboratory and quality management, and process manufacturing intelligence.
‘Accelrys’ strategy is to provide customers with solutions and tools that will enable them to optimise the scientific innovation lifecycle from discovery to commercialisation,’ said Dick Slansky, senior analyst for PLM and industry at ARC Advisory Group. ‘The acquisition of Accelrys by Dassault Systèmes will make the Accelrys scientific innovation
4 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD Amsterdam
(ELN) at Unilever, Barrett said, was a set of meetings and briefings to senior managers to bring out the potential for conflict between short- term and longer-term goals and the need to balance the two, especially during the early stages of implementation before the improvements become apparent to all. Barrett’s job is to help ‘connect people to a
world of data’ and to capture and manage data consistently across the company’s R&D sites. So far, about 20 per cent of experiments were producing data that was re-used later elsewhere in the organisation. But, Barrett said: ‘Tere were many more
projects than we had expected where the data had to be protected and not shared.’ Some of the data might be important in future for filing patents. Other projects represented long-term trials where it was necessary to prevent the premature disclosure of data to avoid the wrong
platform available to enrich Dassault Systèmes’ molecular chemistry capabilities in the life sciences, CPG and manufacturing industry sectors.’ The integration of the company’s 3DExperience platform with Accelrys’ strong suite of applications opens up the opportunity to support and develop collaboration, project management, data and content reuse, traceability, and other processes for scientific industries, especially pharmaceutical companies. Biovia will provide enterprise-wide scientific, biological, chemical and material solutions, with
access and delivery through Dassault Systèmes’ 3DExperience business platform. ‘Today is an important day for Dassault Systèmes and one which I, personally, have been looking forward to for several years. Dassault Systèmes’ previous research programmes in life sciences and BioIntelligence were precursors to today’s new brand and capabilities,’ said Bernard Charlès, president and CEO of Dassault Systèmes. ‘The integration of Accelrys’ powerful applications with our 3DExperience platform will create a
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