The last edition of the Paperless Lab Academy, celebrated in Barcelona in April 2016, hosted a lecture by, Research Vice President, Life Science R&D at Gartner, Michael Shanler entitled: “Laboratory Informatics in the Digital Era”.

The Research VP of the prestigious American research and advisory firm providing information technology structured his talk according to four axes:

1. Forces and technology trends impacting all businesses in the “Digital Era”
2. CIO priorities
3.  IT environment for Scientific Industries 
4.  How technology will enable laboratory innovation transformation.

Some of the talk’s highlights were:

• The future is unknown, but the technology precursors for big changes are here, today.
• By 2017, 80% of ELN* will underperform due to changing R&D needs and unsustainable service models, requiring replacement or overhauls.
• By 2019, 30% of the top 100 life science R&D IT organizations will have successfully moved big data projects from proof of concept (POC) and pilots into production. *process and data workflows.

To learn more about the challenges of Lab of the future as envisioned by Gartner, click on the following link.

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Most of the current and future issues of data lab management are related to software systems that are unable to provide easily information to the right people at the right time, or/and due to the difficulties to align the data with data from other sources. In addition, the promising lab of the future (IoT, Google Glasses) has yet to come.

Well aware of this, the Allotrope foundation, and more precisely Dr. Gerhard Noelken, Director of informatics at Pfizer and Allotrope Foundation explained during the Paperless Lab Academy event in April 2016 that having an open framework for Laboratory Data can be the solution.

The Allotrope Foundation is an international association of pharmaceutical and biotech companies dedicated to the development of a Laboratory Framework to improve efficiency in data acquisition, archiving, and management processes.

Having a common framework for the lab data implies remarkable improvements:

1. Less Manual Document Preparation
2. Improved Data Integrity
3. Seamless data exchange & with partners & CROs
4. Lower Data Management Costs
5. Facilitating Regulatory Compliance.

Finally, it would also mean the opportunity to Extract Knowledge & Value from Data in an easy and secure manner.

In a nutshell, The Allotrope Framework supports laboratory progress in Data integrity and Semantic technology by enabling the consistent use of standards & metadata in software development. To learn more about what Allotrope’s open framework initiative can do for you, click on the following link.

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During the latest Paperless Lab Academy, a two-day event held in Barcelona in April 2016, Deputy Editor at Europa Science Ltd Robert Roe learnt the key challenges for the lab industry are data integrity, process improvement, and being able to manage data effectively, as indicated in Scientific Computing World’s (SCW) “Picking up the pace at PLA” article.

In addition to these three key challenges - argues the article from SCW, the only global publication dedicated to the computing and information technology needs of scientists and engineers -  we should bear in mind what  innovation implies.

“ A real innovation requires users to change their mindset, to manage the adoption of new technologies efficiently, and in some cases, to redefine how and why informatics data is captured ”

The article builds on five main points:

1. increasing data integrity
2. management complexities
3. project unification
4. driving efficiency through process improvement
5. putting a price on change

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