LEADERS ROUNDTABLE


Francois Beiullouin: “Today you cannot ignore mobile devices while building your technology roadmap. It certainly influences the structure of our eLN product. By nature, a mobile application is focused and optimised to provide access to a restricted set of features while travelling or moving in the labs. For companies looking to improve efficiency, it provides additional touch points for employees by allowing easier and faster access to their data or tasks. It is a good way to engage employees by providing nice modern tools in addition to allowing flexible time management.”


Pierre Rodrigues: “Mobility inside a laboratory can be useful to obtain specific information where it is required. On our LabCollector LIMS, this can be for example retrieving a tube from a freezer (eg: with barcode usage). eLN mobile interface can also become useful to annotate some experiment from different locations where the work is taking place. This mobility can be as simple as web interface on any computer. Touch systems like tablets, is maybe more a gadget than a real benefit. In labs, such touch interfaces may not work because of reasons as simple as gloves that impair the touch feature. Also, tablet interfaces are generally quite limited in terms of features for rich-text editing, java support, etc. However, tablets or PDA can be useful on sample logging in the field.”


Dominic John: “Certainly, but we need to be careful about what we ask for. Smart devices providing mobility and touch-screen technology are not ideal for data entry but do provide an excellent environment for browsing and exploring corporate, project, experiment and sample information. Thus, we see a need for our products to support ‘lite’ interfaces and browsing environments that give scientists easy access to crucial information, enabling them to update a limited amount of infor- mation in an eLN experiment. There’s an interesting recent blog discussion on this subject in the Accelrys Community at: https://community.accelrys.com/community/ac celrys_blog/blog/2011/06/27/the-future-of- smart-devices-like-the-ipad-in-the-lab.”


Nick Townsend: “Yes, mobile devices and touch interfaces are enriching all our lives and widespread adoption in the laboratory is only a matter of time. We have witnessed a gradual increase in demand for this technology for


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European Pharmaceutical Review Volume 16 | Issue 4 | 2011


applications such as sampling, logging sample movements, delivery of management information etc., and our ‘Visual Dashboard’ technology is already proving effective for touch screens. LabWare has long adopted a strategy of implementing software to minimise dependence on third party products such as those from Oracle and Microsoft, to maximise deployment flexibility. We try to use open, industry standards for all our development work. This has already delivered benefits – for example, we were able to use our LIMS on the iPhone within hours of Apple releasing it for sale in the shops in 2007 with no changes to the product software. Not only does this development strategy provide our customers with deployment flexibility, but it also provides for more resilience to change in the future. The mobile / touch screen market is moving very fast and locking into one vendor’s mobile technology could be a big mistake.”


Michael Elliott: “Small molecule discovery dominated the early days of ELN. With investment in biologics accelerating, what are the new data management challenges this market faces and how are you addressing it?”


Pierre Rodrigues: “Biological reporting is maybe less formatted as chemistry. We think that eLNs in such area must be easy to use and flexible; more in a way one would use word or blank paper. The LabCollector eLN was built in that way, with the possibility however to add some formatting like spreadsheet calculations or templates when needed.”


Dominic John: “The explosion of new biologics information raises four opportunities for scientific communities embracing an eLN. First, biologics have complex genealogy that is essential to trace in development. Thus, capabilities to trace downstream and upstream biologics initiatives are essential. Secondly, we need to ensure that recipes and methodologies are accurately captured and biologic entities uniquely registered in the eLN. The third need is flexibility to capture, map and access structured information from different sources. The fourth need is improved analytics within the eLN, enabling scientists to perform and document routine analyses of biologics. Accelrys has recently integrated Pipeline Pilot analytics and reporting into the eLN.


Researchers using our eLN can access a wide range of capabilities from the Pipeline Pilot Collections – including Next Generation Sequencing data processing, visualisation and analysis.”


Glyn Williams: “Although the technologies, the science and the processes to make a biologic are different to small molecule – there is a fundamental similarity to small molecule development: having the data to make good decisions. So while the technologies and the science (and hence the end user tools) that are required to help biologics development are completely different – dealing with sequences, plasmids, cell lines, fermentation, purification etc they still do the same fundamental things; take a lead, optimise it, manufacture it, sell it. Obviously the requirements of what to track and what data is needed to do this is different so the platform used to do this must be flexible and capable of working with different ‘data concepts’ but without having to re-write a new eLN. Our motto has always been the same – provide an eLN infrastructure that can work across all areas of science and research without the need for custom code – as this is what makes systems untenable and expensive in the medium to longer term and is a problem that some customers are now seeing with some of their early implementations of other eLN systems.”


Nick Townsend: “Our goal is to provide eLN functionality that is not constrained by application area, and to provide it in a manner that resembles the tools customers are usually most comfortable (and productive!) with such as spreadsheets and document editors. We do not believe it is viable in the long-term for vendors to develop different types of eLN product for different applications, although we do consider it practical to develop modules that are application specific. We consider that our eLN should enable efficient capture, organisation and reporting of the widest possible range of data and this includes the relatively high proportion of textual, score-based and image related information found in biotech/biological applications. However, we do not think it is our place to provide software for the ‘science’ behind the data, i.e. the interpretation / processing of the data. Our strategy is to provide smart interfaces to data interpretation tools, as well as providing open interfaces for customers to interface our eLN to third party tools.”


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