eLN Supplement


LEADERS ROUNDTABLE


Dominic John Product Marketing Director, Accelrys Inc


Glyn Williams Vice President of Product Delivery, IDBS


Pierre Rodrigues General Manager, AgileBio


Francois Beillouin OpenLab ELN Product Manager, Agilent


Nick Townsend Director of Life Sciences, LabWare Europe


Thomas Schmidt Informatics, Senior Product Manager, Waters GmbH


Moderator:


Michael Elliott CEO, Atrium Research


Michael Elliott: “The pending passage of the American Invents Act will transition the United States to a first-to-file patent process in sync with the rest of the world. What impact, if any, do you feel this will have on customers and the eLN market?”


Dominic John:“Intellectual Property (IP) protection in a first-to-file patent environment is only a small part of the electronic laboratory notebook’s role in today’s electronic lab. To quote an eLN customer, “when everything else is electronic, an eLN makes a lot of sense.” By enabling scientists to document experiments, find and re-use information and collaborate more efficiently, eLNs can increase productivity by up to 20 per cent. eLNs also save time in the patent process, making it possible for scientists to self document a verified chain of events from discovery through reduction to practice. eLNs streamline and accelerate the assembly and submittal of patent dossiers by providing better traceability, searchability and adherence to corporate standards and formats within and across collaborating teams. For these reasons, scientific organisations will continue to adopt eLNs at a high rate.”


Glyn Williams: “Many eLN systems, particularly those adopted early into small-molecule


www.europeanpharmaceuticalreview.com


Michael Elliott, Founder, CEO and Chief Analyst at Atrium Research, a scientific market research and consulting company, poses a series of questions for leading experts from the top eLN vendor companies on their use in the pharmaceutical industry.


chemistry environments, were justified and designed primarily as solutions for establishing IP priority on a first-to-invent basis. This functional model breaks if the USPO joins the rest of the world in adopting first-to-file. The legacy ‘fast-to-pdf’ approach also misses the real potential of an eLN. Patent generation, like R&D, is a multidisciplinary information integration activity that needs to be slick and quick – particularly under first-to-file and therein lies the basis for the long term value of data-centric eLN. Apart from the obvious benefits of reduced wastage, improved digital security and sharing of best practice, data-centric eLN systems are proven to increase the pace of research, through personal productivity gains, task-flow management and better collaborative decision- making. This favours ‘first-to-file’, with the surety that the data are substantiated, down to the raw data level. These data can be scrutinised by examiners from multiple jurisdictions and validated easily, despite the years of elapsed time between filing and examination. Also, and all-important in today’s IP and licensing environment – where ownership of the ‘object’ is far less important than the information about what it does – the data needed for filing must be multidisciplinary


and therefore so must be the eLN system used to secure and exploit valuable IP.”


Francois Beillouin: “We don’t see a big impact on the eLN market or on our software. Here’s why: although the IP protection had been a major driver in early days for eLNs, it has commoditised since then. As a consequence, electronic signatures, data traceability and trailing, e-records time stamping are all built-in functions (may or may not be activated upfront) that constitute the best practices in this domain and they operate transparently for the end-user. Then it’s not only about IP Protection but overall data integrity, this is why you would not get rid of them!”


Nick Townsend: “It will have an impact, but we don’t think it will dramatically accelerate uptake of eLN, beyond the current demand. Interest in eLN is already high and most pharmaceutical companies recognise the benefits for data security, regulatory compliance and productivity, The American Invents Act is simply another reason to maximise use of software such as eLN and LIMS in the laboratory and as always, uptake will be determined by the budgets allocated to software projects and the Return on Investment versus the paper


European Pharmaceutical Review 21 Volume 16 | Issue 4 | 2011


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