Within the lab R&D space, accessing data and scientific knowledge in a timely manner is essential to innovation. IT solutions are focusing on consolidating numerous applications into more comprehensive systems, and making use of the cloud to run analytics, condense processing times, and provide a resource to store extensive data. Extracting valuable information from the earliest stages of drug development can offer a key advantage in R&D operations.
 
Tom Arneman, president of Ceiba Solutions discusses lab IT trends, the challenges researchers face in the lab, some the latest IT offerings for lab R&D, as well as what solutions we can expect to see down the road.  – KB
 
Contract Pharma:What are some R&D lab trends and how do they impact IT?
 
Tom Arneman: With the clinical space saturated with solutions, the focus is now shifting to driving competitive advantage in research. This focus comes in the form of innovation for both partner and ecosystem developments, as well as driving internal solutions for improved productivity for researchers. In either case, data is the lifeblood of the research pipeline. 
 
There are some exciting things happening to enable collaboration between internal leads and outsourced research groups including new protocols for sharing data and new relationships between biopharma and their peers and partners. Virtual labs, based on enterprise communication suites, will enable scientists across the globe to collaborate in real time.
 
Other trends worth noting:
·       The cloud has become an increasingly important part of managing data. 

·       Within the lab, the focus is on enabling analysts to increase the speed of the pipeline through good science. This has created a  need for focused lab-specific IT support and related solutions. We’ve seen a massive uptick in requests for a comprehensive lab IT support model. Organizations are also seeking support teams with specific knowledge and experience managing multi-vendor lab equipment, applications and related data.
 
·       On the innovation side, mobile is coming into its own in the lab space. These solutions are shifting the time and space of lab management, allowing analysts to manage experiments or run analysis from their labs, desks or homes.
 
·       A move toward cross-platform, self-service access is gaining momentum. The traditional heavy-handed approach to application management and data warehousing has proven to be too expensive and ineffective. A new, agile breed of knowledge management will allow analysts to access functionality from the right applications from a single user interface.
 
·       Finally, within senior management there is a significant interest in externalizing internally developed technology. In research, more than anywhere else, the openness to precompetitive collaboration is high. We’ve worked with a number of pharma and biotech companies to commercialize internally developed applications.
 
CP: What IT challenges do researchers currently face in the lab?
 
TA: In many cases the challenges are basic. Is there an available instrument for this experiment? Who is responsible for resolving my support request? Why do I need to access three applications to answer a simple question? Although many scientists are highly technical, the overarching interest is for IT organizations to align to scientific objectives and make IT transparent and supportive. 
 
Data access and knowledge management are the primary focuses for researches in the lab. A given analyst may have access to only a small percentage of the organization’s overall intelligence about a research topic. The collection and preparation of relevant data from hundreds of potential public and private sources may consume 30-40% of a given analyst’s work day. In a recent assessment, on one of Ceiba’s clients implemented a solution to address this process and documented 30 minutes per day per scientist in savings – essentially a 10% increase in the organization’s scientific workforce.
 
CP: What are the primary concerns clients have when seeking solutions?
 
TA: A major unmet need in the research space still exists: biological data that has yet to be simply categorized and structured. An ability to manage and practically apply the variety of information requires a unique mix of scientific and technical capabilities that remains difficult to find in the marketplace. In fact, we’re driving a collaborative approach to defining and storing biological data to fill this gap. Our approach involves a tagging methodology that allows end users to connect, store and retrieve data. 
 
CP: Are there integration issues among various IT systems in thelab?
 
TA: Definitely. There are many integration issues in the lab. For example, there may be dozens of applications related to a given research topic. Each of these refers to the topic using different nomenclature, has different levels of security, and may be simply unknown to the analyst doing the research.
 
Traditional integration approaches have proven difficult in some cases due to the sheer size of data being accessed. It’s incredibly expensive to support a data warehouse combining terabytes of data from many systems. The alternative approach, using semantic analysis, is beginning to take hold but is only available to a small number of highly technical users.
 
In a recent conversation, a lab operations manager lamented about the time and effort required to do simple queries of data across the lab’s LIMs/ELN environment. Tackling these simple integration requirements first will create the capacity and platforms that will drive innovation for more strategic requirements. 
 
To address the integration issues, Ceiba is building out libraries (knowledge bases) of integration for common research applications and data sources and providing them through a self-service marketplace. The solution leverages a virtual data warehouse approach to avoid massive data problems while giving users the ability to get just the data or functionality they need to do their work.
 
CP: How do lab IT solutions differ from those designed for clinical trials?
 
TA: From an industry perspective the clinical space has matured and consolidated across a number of primary platforms and service providers. There are relatively few choices on the market to manage clinical trial data as well as major consultancies of standard practice for services. Additionally, apart from the patient-related processes, most clinical work is done in an office environment more aligned to traditional IT service offerings.
 
The research space remains relatively immature and fragmented. In a recent application inventory for one of our clients, we identified hundreds of applications living in the research domain including many custom solutions. Technical and service offerings need to account for this type of fragmentation. Integrating platforms must be done in a way that allows a highly configurable approach. Services organizations must have wide and deep expertise in the use of research data and an understanding of research.
 
Additionally, the lab represents a very different technical environment. While clinical processes revolve primarily around a patient’s selection and data capture, research revolves around the instruments used to do the science. The lab represents a specific process for understanding and managing physical assets in a sensitive and unique environment. Solutions for the lab must take into account the physical use of instruments, related control applications and processes to collect and process vast amounts of resulting data.
 
CP: What are some the latest IT offerings for lab R&D?
 
TA: Asset utilization is an offering that a number of lab-related companies are developing. This capability will allow organizations to reduce the number of purchases and better use massive capital investments.  Likewise, the cloud is becoming the go-to/low cost means of running complex analytics, condensing processing times from months to hours and providing a secure, expandable resource to store ever -increasing data storage requirements.
 
Finally, lab IT services are gaining traction across a range of laboratories, including the fields of research, quality and manufacturing. Across the board, executives who manage the labs and scientists who work in them are looking to IT services for expertise in managing their instrument-connected PCs and software. Increasingly, organizations are removing the IT burden from scientists and delivering a single point of management of labs, apps and data.
 
CP: In what ways has lab research changed over the years and what can we expect from future IT solutions?
 
TA: The major change has been in the outsourcing of core lab operations. We’ve moved from a situation where there was widespread outsourcing, to operations outsourcing, and now to business development acquisitions. Future IT solutions for the lab will need to allow for the variety of models available and securely connect different organizations in the drug development lifecycle.
 
Within the lab, there will be a continued shift from paper-based and gut-feel lab management to an electronic means of overseeing the physical lab environment. We’ve seen the broad adoption of LIMS and the ELN for basic scientific processing. This will now move to a more integrated solution and single point of connection for the scientist to create, share and analyze data. The lab of the future will include touch screen monitors, comprehensive data access and the “internet of things,” giving the researcher freedom to drive the pipeline.

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Kristin Brooks has been the associate editor at Contract Pharma since 2004.