ANALYTICAL & LABORATORY EQUIPMENT
of computer files and documents tend to disperse on as many computers as scientists have. Apart from scientific calculations and analysis, digital solutions can help centralising, unifying and indexing these documents so the information can be crossed, returned and preserved when needed.” Matt Botterman, Global FreezerPro business manager, also emphasises the advantages of careful digitalisation: “Digital solutions allow instant communication across laboratories where all levels can see what is happening in real time. Tey also offer a reliable way to hold records over long periods of time. In industries such as biobanking it’s critical to be able to hold consistent records and be able to easily search through them. Paper records do not allow this searchability. Digital solutions can also improve security through password access or encryption of the data.”
CONNECTIVITY We are now in the fourth industrial age, meaning that technology is increasingly connected, with the attendant technical complexities and solutions that one might expect. Equipment or sensors can now be connected directly using internet and cloud networks, but equipment and software are often purchased at different times for different reasons.
“Connectivity in the labs is still quite heterogenous and mixes quite a
Electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) area core part of the move towards paperless labs
lot of technologies partly because of the longevity of such devices,” comments Rodrigues. “Labs invest significant amounts of money in such machines and tend to keep them in place for decades. We can see top-notch recent genomics machines side by side with a 30-year old spectrometer.” Cloud-based servers can ensure records can be accessed anywhere in the world. “Tis is particularly useful when looking at samples in the office, in the lab and at the freezer,” says Botterman. “Equally, it allows us to back up the data to a
secondary server on a different continent – this is very useful in disaster planning.” Alan James, managing director, Clinical
Systems, warns that although there are benefits to using the internet and intranets for communication purposes, such uses, especially the internet, pose very real threats of cyber-attack. “Research and medical laboratories are under constant threat of attack and we are aware of several such attacks which have been successful,” he reveals. “Consequently, we advise our customers to keep their raw data collection, collation and storage as isolated as possible from the internet and to ensure frequent and multiple, physically remote, back-ups of their raw data.”
Agilebio’s Lab Collector platform
ACCURACY Lab software can help in avoiding errors by implementing rules and limits. In that respect it can be safer than paper, says Rodrigues. Botterman is in accord: “By fixing formats for input, errors can be limited. It’s possible to use a range of words or terms that can mean similar things but can also be mis-interpreted. A digital format can remove this ambiguity.” Te whole purpose of the GxP (good practice) guidelines issued and enforced by regulatory authorities such as FDA (Food & Drug Administration), EMA (European Medicines Agency) and OECD (Organisation for Economic Development & Co-operation), is to ensure accuracy of medically related data, says James.
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