Paperless laboratories do better science because they allow to access and reuse accurate data quickly and easily. In addition, they are able to protect sensitive information.

This was one of the conclusions reached during the Paperless Lab Academy (PLA) held in Amsterdam in May 2014 as Scientific Computing World (SCW) article "Paperless laboratories do better science"  reports.

Benefits of Paperless Labs

The benefits of moving to a Paperless Lab system are evident if we consider that “between 10 per cent and 25 per cent of data records contain errors or missing values. A 3 per cent error rate could push costs up by 30 per cent” as Gerhard Noelken, Business IT Lead for the pharmaceutical company Pfizer for about 9 years stated, according to the above SCW article.

Moreover, as Nick Nugent from ACD/Labs pointed out, the benefits of a successful Paperless approach can be huge: “If improved tools for searching data could shave just one month off the time to bring a new chemical entity to market in the pharmaceutical industry, then that would represent more than $10.5 million in net present value”.

On the other hand, “Successful implementation of paperless laboratory approaches depends as much on successful ‘change management’ among the staff affected by the move as on the details of the technology itself”, explained Peter Boogaard, chairman of the Paperless Lab Academy 2014.

The success of this ‘change management’ process implies professionals must be aware of the need to balance short-term and longer-term goals, especially during the early stages of implementation before the improvements become apparent to all, as Lawrence Barrett, programme director of Digital R&D at Unilever explained in his keynote address.

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Two big shifts in the focus of Lab informatics software are posing a challenge for the pharma industry. The first shift is due to the rise of the web and cloud-based services and their consequences regarding data management. The second axe of transformation is the increasing interest in process-analytic quality assurance as opposed to the end-product quality control that was predominant in the past.

This was one of the conclusions reached during the Paperless Lab Academy held in Amsterdam in 2014, as Tom Wilkie reports in his third Scientific Computing World article entitled "Is the end of the QC lab and its LIMS in sight?".

Laboratory management: from quality control to quality assurance

As the aforementioned article explains, the consequences of the current shift from end-of-line quality control to in-line quality assurance are important, both for the laboratory and for the vendors of lab informatics software. Jan Verelst from Siemens conveyed these implications through an eloquent question addressed to the Paperless Lab Academy audience: ‘Do we need to stay with the traditional QC laboratory?’.

Is the end of the QC lab and its LIMS in sight?

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The Paperless Lab Academy celebrated in Amsterdam in May 2014 discussed over three main questions  for a laboratory of the industry. The first was whether paperless laboratories do better science, and the second was dedicated to analysing the implications of the Cloud for the traditional informatics vendors, as Tom Wilkie (chief editor Scientific Computing World) reports in his second of three articles summarising the 2014 edition.

Implications of Cloud services for lab informatics

The PLA2014 has offered a vision of a future lab in which expensive stand-alone informatics systems are being replaced by software as a service (SaaS). This shift from corporate, in-house, closed, research to outsourced and networked research and data management in the pharmaceutical industry has profound implications regarding patenting, confidentiality and admissibility of evidence. On the other hand, due to the fact that this is also a highly-regulated industry, pharmaceutical companies need to demonstrate that every piece of data has been checked and verified and that there is a solid audit trail to prevent falsification, as Tom Wilkie reports.

A dark Cloud for traditional lab informatics vendors?

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