LABORATORY INFORMATICS


Laboratory in the cloud


CLOUD-BASED INFORMATICS SOFTWARE IS GROWING FAST THANKS TO HIGHLY FLEXIBLE AND CUSTOMISABLE DEPLOYMENT METHODS, WRITES SOPHIA KTORI


Estimates suggest that the global laboratory informatics market, valued at $2.6 billion in 2019, will


witness CAGR of 7.5 per cent over the next five years, reaching $3.8 billion in 2024[1]


.


And while it’s a market that is still dominated by on-premise models of deployment, cloud-based solutions are expected to witness the highest growth rate.


Domainex is a UK-based integrated drug


discovery contract research organisation (CRO) offering services spanning medicinal and computational chemistry, protein expression and crystallography, cell-based and biochemical assay development. Working with clients across the industrial pharmaceutical, and biotech, and academic sectors, Domainex' informatics infrastructure sits on Dotmatics’ cloud-hosted database, installed in 2018, and now includes additional biology- and chemistry-specific Dotmatics modules. 'Ours is a very competitive market,


and we have to be able to find ways of differentiating ourselves with regard to offering services that give our clients an advantage, as well as maximising our efficiency and flexibility,' commented Mark Stewart, chemistry team leader. 'Dotmatics’ cloud informatics ELN and


20 Scientific Computing World June/July 2019


focused functionality allows us to have that competitive edge.' Dotmatics offers scalable, fully


integrated scientific informatics solutions to diverse global markets including the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, food and beverage, oil and gas, and agrochemical industries and related academia. Available as local or cloud-hosted solutions, the firm’s portfolio includes its flagship ELN, and platforms for chemistry and biologics database and screening management, small molecule/biologics discovery, chemical and biological registration, structure activity relationship (SAR) analysis, reporting, and visualisation, and collaborative research. Compound database management,


accessibility and security are central to Domainex’ day-to-day operation, so the Dotmatics’ solutions were an ideal fit for a company that, as Stewart noted, has the philosophy: ‘every compound counts.’ 'That means that when we are designing compounds and working with clients it is critical to have all the data at hand, both internally to make more informed decisions about the next design iterations, and also so that we can speed and maximise information depth and flow to our clients.' Domainex wasn’t unusual in that it originally set up the Dotmatics solution on site, rather than in the cloud. That was back in 2013. 'At that time there was still a reluctance to trust data in a cloud environment,' Stewart noted. 'Because we are a client-based organisation, security of third-party data was a particular concern, and we originally built the platform in- house, where we felt more comfortable with our own security arrangements.' Last year Domainex decided that times


had changed, and a solution in-house was no longer the best solution. Problems became critical when one of the Domainex staff who had key knowledge of the locally hosted system left the company, commented Ray Boffey, Domainex deputy head of chemistry. 'One of our team who had been integral to building and customising the database on the Linux- based Dotmatics platform left Domainex, and took a lot of knowledge with him.' The installation had involved significant


customisation, and loss of this one individual translated to problems when it came to upgrading the platform. 'The upgrades didn’t work as they should have,' Boffey admitted. 'Domainex tried to move from a Linux system to a Windows platform internally, but that wasn’t workable either. 'These key issues prompted us to start looking at the cloud about two years ago – people were changing their opinions on cloud-hosted database access by then – and we also realised that there would be major benefits in terms of time and cost when upgrading.'


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