LABORATORY INFORMATICS


Connecting science


SOPHIA KTORI CONSIDERS HOW SOFTWARE INTEGRATION HELPS ENSURE SCIENTISTS WORK EFFICIENTLY IN THE LABORATORY


Interconnection is an imperative for the modern laboratory, and seamless integration is


mandatory from the perspective of the end user, who is generally a scientist. That’s the view of Leif Pedersen, president of software at Certara. ‘Scientists using lab technologies


want to be able to do their work as effectively and efficiently as possible, and part of that requires interconnecting


18 Scientific Computing World Winter 2021


their systems and instrumentation in a seamless way.’ The key aim is to establish lab


workflows to make it easier to find the answers to scientific questions, to save time and also – in a drug discovery or development setting, for example – to identify likely failures as soon as possible. ‘The overall goal is to gain a more


insightful, aggregated view of distributed and collective data, enable analysis and decision making and to collaborate with colleagues in a way that can lead to achieve common goals faster. ‘In the life science arena, software


vendors are trying to provide their customers with an environment that facilitates decision-making based on insight from many data sources,’ Pedersen said. ‘We’re trying to bring it all into a relevant dashboard, not just at


the high level, like which molecules to proceed with or not, but also the ability to provide views into what to do next to progress the right candidates forward as fast as possible.’


Bringing data together The concept of integration needs to be founded at the level of understanding about what data is generated in labs, and why and how that data can be used and combined with other data. Pedersen said: ‘We have to think of both actual experimental data, and also the related metadata, which provides the context. There are some software tools on the market that excel in enriching the overall data platform, so that you can have even smarter intelligence by bringing together all of the different data in a more meaningful way.’


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