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Increasing Research Throughput with an ELN for Chemists and Biologists
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
- Pharmaceuticals
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Predictive Quality Analytics
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Lead Pharma’s new entity discovery and development capability has grown significantly during recent years. In response, assay throughputs and analysis requirements have increased within the company’s research functions and based on their experience within larger organizations, scientists at Lead Pharma were concerned about the limitations of traditional paper laboratory notebooks. Paper-based cross-referencing of scientific information heavily relied on team knowledge and was consequently vulnerable to staff turnover. Industry processes also required laboratory journals to be checked and countersigned by a scientific colleague or supervisor; a procedure dependent on the timely availability of appropriate staff members. Paper notebooks were used in combination with conventional Microsoft software packages (e.g. Excel, Word) and digital databases, resulting in a labor intensive, mixed-media approach.
About The Customer
Lead Pharma is a company that discovers and develops innovative therapeutics against cancer and autoimmune diseases. The company has unparalleled expertise in the discovery and optimization of first- and best-in class small molecules for challenging drug targets. Lead Pharma’s drug discovery engine combines adept medicinal, structural and computational chemistry capability with complementary expertise in the fields of cell biology and omics technologies. The company’s innovative approach enables isolation, purification and manufacture of target proteins and the development of biochemical, cellular, and functional reporter assays as well as biomarkers. Lead Pharma’s highly skilled workforce, many of which hold a PhD in Chemistry or Biology and have extensive experience across big pharma and biotech sectors, are based at state-of-the-art research laboratories at the Pivot Park in Oss, the Netherlands.
The Solution
Lead Pharma sought an Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) to replace their paper-based system that would also integrate with the company’s existing internal project database; the primary data repository for all structural and assay data. A key requirement was an ability to support both chemistry and biological science functions across the business. After a full market review, the Dotmatics Platform was selected. The Studies Notebook ELN addressed each of Lead Pharma’s specific challenges, with features and tools that offered value for chemists and biologists across the organization. Dotmatics Studies Notebook enabled signing and countersigning of experimental work, facilitated collaborative working and provided a fully searchable system that was easy to navigate via the interactive dashboard. The ELN allowed assay scientists to flexibly record experiments, new compounds to be recorded as individual studies in the system and experiments could be cloned to simplify protocols for production of compounds synthesized from a common reaction. In addition, Lead Pharma chose to license the Dotmatics Vortex product for advanced data visualization and analytics.
Operational Impact
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