Should We Call It an ELNLIMS?

We won't call it the holy grail, but the announcement by Thermo Scientific and Symyx regarding the release of an integrated LIMS/ELN product is a significant step towards a fully integrated, electronic laboratory. Researchers should have more power and functionality at their fingertips, with fewer obstacles towards accessing and sharing data. That spells more efficient development efforts.

In a press release last spring announcing the Thermo-Symyx partnership, Symyx president Trevor Heritage boasted that lab professionals will have the “ability to record and execute experimental protocols, capture results, access and analyze data, build reports and collaborate with colleagues seamlessly."

Given that it's now just six months since the partnership was announced, clearly there will be bugs to be worked out of the new offering, but that's to be expected.

Another intriguing question: What do we call something that combines a three-letter and four-letter acronym? ILMS (Integrated Lab Management System)? I'll have a chance to speak with representatives of both

Pharma IT Moves Further Into the SaaS Era

Symyx has announced that it will begin offering its electronic laboratory notebooks in a hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. The company's press release suggests that this move is in response to economic pressures to offer cheaper, more flexible options, but the trend towards web-based IT offerings is one that will dovetail nicely with pharmaceutical companies' needs for better ways of integrating the work of their scientists worldwide.

The hosted Symyx Notebook will enable "medicinal chemists, synthetic chemists and biologists to manage, explore, share and reuse experimental information and intellectual property (IP). Using a hosted ELN service, R&D organizations can deploy and leverage the electronic notebook quickly and efficiently without added IT infrastructure and resources while collaborating more effectively with partners in today’s information-driven R&D environment."

Information security is a key concern, of course, which Symyx addresses in its announcement.

--Paul Thomas

What is Your QbD Pain Point?

I had a chance to catch up again with Blue Reference's Paul van Eikeren last week, to talk about the progress of QbD in pharma, and about IT solutions to meet manufacturers' QbD needs. I've been following Blue Reference closely for the past year since van Eikeren is a proven innovator and business success--as founder of electronic lab notebook pioneer Intellichem (now part of Symyx)--and it's clear that he now aims to make a big splash with Blue Reference by leveraging the synergies between its software and the Quality by Design movement.

Through its QbD product development consortium, Blue Reference is working closely with manufacturers to codevelop novel QbD-focused solutions, and van Eikeren now feels that he has hit upon something that will make a difference: what he calls Paradigm Discovery, software that aims to mine manufacturers' R&D data from the past, find useful information, and put it in a format that can assist current QbD efforts. Manufacturers' major QbD pain point, van Eikeren says, is not being able to draw upon years of data from the past, and get return on investment for drug development studies that may never have led to a marketed product. Since the product is still in early development and hasn't been demo'ed for clients yet, van Eikeren isn't saying too much about how it works. Here is the summary of what he was willing to share with me.

Stay tuned . . . I aim to follow up with van Eikeren every so often, since Blue Reference is one of those bellwether companies by which to gauge the progress of QbD itself.

--Paul Thomas