ELNs - Articles and news items

Informatics – In-depth focus 2012

Issue 4 2012, Supplements / 2 September 2012 / European Pharmaceutical Review

This free to view Informatics in-depth focus is sponsored by IDBS, LabWare, Thermo Scientific and Waters:

• DEVELOPING INFORMATICS FOR THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY
  Michael H. Elliott, CEO, Atrium Research & Consulting
• ROLLING OUT A BIOLOGY ELN AT UCB PHARMA
  David Lee, Principal Scientist, Informatics, UCB
• ASK THE INFORMATICS EXPERTS
  John Wise, Executive Director, Pistoia Alliance
  Gerhard Noelken, Pfizer
  Alexander Botzski, ELN Project Officer, VIB
  Michael H. Elliott, CEO, Atrium Research & Consulting
• LABORATORY INFORMATICS – OUT OF THE FOG AND INTO THE CLOUD?
  John Trigg, Director, phaseFour Informatics
• SHOW PREVIEW
  11th Annual ELNs & Advanced Laboratory Solutions

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Implementing electronic laboratory notebooks to improve the efficiency of pre-clinical drug discovery

Issue 6 2011 / 13 December 2011 / Sheraz Gul, Vice President and Head of Biology, European ScreeningPort GmbH

The pre-clinical phase of drug discovery spans a period in the region of five years and requires contributions from multi-disciplinary teams often working at different sites. These teams can generate significant amounts of data which are processed using standard as well as specialist software. The recording of a substantial amount of project related experimental work has historically been performed using paper-based laboratory notebooks completed manually with all files usually being stored locally.

This scenario poses a variety of issues such as delayed access to important information to the project team members which could ultimately reduce its efficiency and thus increase the time taken to complete the project. These paper-based notebooks are now being replaced by an electronic laboratory notebook (eLNB) within research laboratories in industry and academia. Such software allows the documentation of experimental data and its sharing within the multi-disciplinary research team and would be expected to improve data integrity, reduce the time to complete the project and improve communication. This article discusses some of the advantages that would be expected to be achieved upon implementing an eLNB in pre-clinical drug discovery. (more…)

Thermo Fisher Scientific simplifies water, environmental & pharmaceutical regulatory compliance

Featured news, News / 28 March 2011 / The Scott Partnership

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., the world leader in serving science, today announced that Nova Biologicals, one of the nation’s largest providers of laboratory testing and consultancy services to the water, environmental, medical device and pharmaceutical industries, has implemented an integrated Thermo Scientific LIMS (laboratory information management system) and NextDocs DMS (document management system) solution.

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Information automation in R&D laboratories; past and future

Issue 4 2008, Past issues / 2 August 2008 /

What were the drivers that helped launch the laboratory information management system (LIMS) and electronic laboratory notebook (ELN)? This article will trace the history of LIMS and ELN from their emergence into the future. Technology development did play a big role to be sure, but the desire of scientists to minimise time performing and analysing experiments provided the biggest push. By looking at the past, one can quite often get a better perspective of what the future will bring. There will be many issues to consider, primarily how to manage and preserve the vast amount of scientific electronic information that is being generated daily.

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Going paperless: is now the time?

Issue 2 2008, Past issues / 19 March 2008 /

Over the past 40 years, the development of increasingly powerful computers has played a major role in the advancement of laboratory experimentation. Initially, the high processing capabilities of computers were exploited to perform complex calculations at unprecedented speeds, often offline to a company’s main frame.

Gradually, as digital technologies progressed, and with the development of the microprocessor, computers were brought into the laboratory and used for data acquisition and data processing. As a consequence, a number of laboratory techniques were revolutionised to such an extent that it is now difficult to believe, by modern standards, just how crude certain measurements had been and also what degree of confidence or accuracy they offered. The cutting out and weighing of chromatography peaks to obtain quantitative data is one such example. (more…)

Implementation of an enterprise ELN: a case study

Issue 4 2007 / 21 July 2007 / Dr. Simon Weston, Programme Delivery Leader, Discovery, AstraZeneca

The paper notebook has played a central role in the recording of the methods and results of scientific research for centuries. It has some strengths: portability, flexibility and (to some degree) incontrovertibility but in an enterprise environment it has many weaknesses. Chief among these is that the vast majority of information entered is lost to the enterprise unless substantial processes and governance structures are created to ensure its dissemination. However, even if these are in place, searching for relevant information is likely to be time-consuming and difficult since there is no automated search capability below the level of the physical book.

In chemistry in particular, the relentless spread of automated, high-throughput synthetic approaches and the attendant growth in related analytical data outputs cast doubt on the suitability of the book format itself; there simply isn’t room to accommodate all the data. Indeed, analytical data print-outs are commonly bound into a book form and signed and stored separately from the laboratory notebook itself. (more…)

The right technology, at the right time

Issue 5 2006, Past issues / 28 September 2006 / EPR

The growing popularity of Electronic Data Capture (EDC) is indicative of a broad recognition that EDC as a method of data capture offers significant realisable benefits. Developers of drugs that use EDC within their clinical research processes will have a significant competitive advantage, bringing new drugs and therapies to market faster and cheaper.

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Interfacing LIMS with ELN

Issue 4 2006, Past issues / 20 July 2006 / Dr Jan Hauss, Laboratory Manager, Merck KGaA

Today, electronic support for scientific research from the bench to the product is reality. For many years there has been an organic growth of different electronic systems in various areas of industry. The current challenge is to combine these electronic islands to form solid ground for integrated cost efficient systems. In this short article I’d like to show how the analytical research LIM system at Merck KGaA is linked with the ELN of the medicinal chemical research.

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