Out with the old and out with the internal
Outsourcing, end-of-life LIMS, and disruptive technologies such as the cloud, are driving changes to the laboratory informatics landscape, as
Tom Wilkie discovered at the Paperless Lab Academy
T
he laboratory informatics industry is facing unprecedented change, both because the pharmaceutical industry is outsourcing more and
more of its activities, and also because many large deployments of laboratory information management systems (LIMS) are nearing the end of their lives but will not be replaced like- for-like. According to Patrick Pijanowski, pharma and
life-sciences partner at US-based consultancy LabAnswer, pharmaceutical companies and other informatics users are not willing to invest in a new LIMS simply to get an incremental upgrade. What they want is ‘transformational change’, he told the Paperless Lab Academy (PLA) in Barcelona, Spain, on 14 April. What is happening is ‘different from what we have seen before. It’s different from what I’ve seen in 20 years in the business,’ he continued. Not quite so fully articulated during the
sessions at the PLA, but forming a pervasive undercurrent nonetheless, was the issue of disruptive technologies – specifically the cloud and, to a lesser extent, big data. Te two tended to be bracketed together as if the cloud was seen, albeit implicitly, as the only technology capable of dealing with the challenges presented by big data. Concerns over data security and the
protection of intellectual property and personal information continued to make some delegates uneasy about jumping immediately into the cloud. But, as the PLA progressed, it became clear that, in a world of externalised pharma companies, current technologies and processes are not performing well either.
10 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD It was not all work at the PLA – Scientific Computing World sponsored the drinks reception In contrast, although mobile devices such
as tablets and PDAs featured frequently, these appeared to be regarded not as disruptive but rather simply as continuing business more or less as usual.
Pharma outsourcing will force standards on informatics Te implications for informatics of the ‘externalisation’ of the pharmaceutical industry dominated the event. In his keynote address, Pijanowski told the meeting that ‘today, the pharmaceutical industry is outsourcing virtually every function,’ with the result that data integrity and system security were major concerns. According to Rachel Uphill, pharmaceutical
companies are outsourcing not just to contract research organisations (CROs) and contract manufacturing organisations but also to academics, making the need for common data formats and standards all the greater. Uphill is business consultant, early IP and data strategy, to the pharmaceutical giant GSK and is also an advisor to the Allotrope Foundation, which was set up by the pharmaceutical industry some three years ago to build a framework for open data standards. In the absence of standards the situation
today, she said, was one of incomplete, incompatible soſtware; no standard data formats; and inconsistent metadata. It is hard for
researchers to mine data for useful information, she pointed out, because the metadata is stored elsewhere and is oſten captured incompletely, inaccurately, or sometimes not at all due to free- text manual entry. Allotrope’s goals, she said, were to create
re-useable soſtware components; an open document standard; and an open metadata repository. Te outcome will be a soſtware toolkit to allow developers to embed a set of standards for analytical data in soſtware utilised throughout the whole of analytical chemistry on different instruments from different vendors. Te project has ambitious deadlines, with
the first public release expected in 2016, only three years since soſtware development started and only four years since the foundation was set up. Te hope is that eventually the ADF – the Allotrope Data Format – will be embedded in instrument and informatics vendors’ soſtware. But as a temporary expedient, to promote the usefulness of ADF before 2016, converters are being developed to transform data to ADF as a separate step. Te progress is all the more remarkable since
the Allotrope Foundation has to move carefully so as to conform at all times with US anti-trust legislation and avoid any suspicion that the pharmaceutical companies might be coming together in a cartel. Consequently, the secretariat for this highly technical exercise is provided by a
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