Thought on the Electronic Lab Notebook

This topic is becoming more interesting to me every day as we see the technologies and the processes evolve. A simple definition of an Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) is becoming almost impossible to agree on as can be seen in a recent discussion group I am a member of over on LinkedIn that points to the LimsWiki definition.

An electronic laboratory notebook (also known as electronic lab notebook or ELN) is a software program or package designed to replace more traditional paper laboratory notebooks. Laboratory notebooks in general are used by scientists and technicians to document, store, retrieve, and share fully electronic laboratory records in ways that meet all legal, regulatory, technical and scientific requirements.^[1] A laboratory notebook is often maintained to be a legal document and may be used in a court of law as evidence. Similar to an inventor's notebook, the lab notebook is also often referred to in patent prosecution and intellectual property litigation. Modern electronic lab notebooks have the advantage of being easier to search upon, support collaboration amongst many users, and can be made more secure than their paper counterparts.

A mouthful and it scrapes the surface of what may be meant when speaking of an investment in an ELN. I gave a talk at an informatics conference in London a couple of years back and showed a chart with overlapping functionality intersecting the role of traditional LIMS systems and the growing ELN segment. That chart has moved forward to the point where now you find markets where they are almost one and the same.

This brings up a couple of interesting discussion points

• Do we need both, or should we blend the systems to make it one experience?
• What is the value of a lab notebook? (GxP / Exploratory / Other – context is a big part of this but I am thinking beyond those aspects to the scientific thought process)
• Does the act of capturing free thought in a (paper?) notebook encourage a different type of thinking than the act of capturing data in a structured system that allows encourages free text or unstructured input as a part of the structure?

Clearly there is room for a discourse on all these topics, and many more that dive deep into the specifics, but as we look at the tools, I can’t help but come back to the question of what are we really trying to do? The technology is not the barrier to capturing data, or even in most cases, information. But are we making the technology a barrier to the process of creative thinking?

LIMS are by design typically built to capture structured information and results sets, manage samples and lifecycles and other common analytical workflow. Paper lab notebooks have for centuries been used to record everything from wild ideas that need to be formed into hypothesis and examined before even approached as a test, to being used as evidence of test execution or development. Now, in the litigious world of drug research and development, they hold a very high burden depending on where in the lifecycle they sit, acting in some cases as patent defense platforms!

I wonder how much we have moved away from creative thinking and free capture of those ideas in our pursuit of the right toolset to capture our data. I know a common theme I have heard from my scientific associates over the years is that there is less and less time for thinking, and more and more effort devoted to execution. Looking at the innovation cycle and the pharma pipeline as a whole, I wonder sometimes how much of the hollow sound in that pipe is regulatory pressure, or external pressure, and how much is a shifting in innovation and creative thinking.