Across the Danube

 

I have a bunch of versions of this photo - I'm not sure which I like the best but I thought it a very impressive building!

ELN Talk this summer / fall

I'm scheduled to give a talk in Amsterdam billed as "The leading conference for ELNs and Data Management strategies" at the end of the summer. The details are online at the conference website.

My talk is: Keynote Presentation: The Role Of ELNs: A Chapter In A Much Larger Story

• How do you strategically select an ELN to fit in with your company requirements?
• Outlining the importance of creating the enterprise strategy to create a seamless informatics platform
• Delving deeper into the Wyeth/Pfizer GLP ELN deployment: why was it a success and what lessons were leaned along the way

I enjoy these events as I almost never leave without great contacts and networking. Any thoughts to contribute are welcome, so feel free to get in touch with me.

Linked Data

The concept of linked data is not new, but is finally hitting the tipping point for implementation where thought leaders, technology, and business drivers are coming together to bring it from theory to reality. Tim Berners-Lee gave a great talk on this topic at a TED conference. Check it out here.

I was moderating a talk at the recent AAPS conference in Seattle and one of my panelists was Randy Julian, from Indigo Biosystems. He focused his talk on the value of linked data in the pharma research space and how it can revolutionize the collaboration process. I very much enjoyed the talk and our subsequent, but brief conversation. We agreed to talk more and I had to bolt as I had meetings with Microsoft and had to catch a plane for Europe to speak at another conference. Things continued to come together with the meeting at Microsoft. While the discussion was brief, it centered around the Amalga platform and the underlying technology. The aim is very similar, in that it looks at data at the atomic level with appropriate meta data for context and just in time reassembly as needed, inferring relationships automatically. The implications for predictive and retrospective automated analysis are huge.

Later that week, I spoke at a conference in Budapest and caught a talk with Nico Adams, from Cambridge University in the UK. He talked about the Semantic Web and how it applies to the research area. We later had dinner with the larger group and talked a bit more. It is encouraging to me to see the synergy across the world, and it points to the critical mass that is building around this topic.

Budapest

The conference went well and I got a solid response on my talk. The morning talks all pointed toward foundational needs for deploying these solutions and set up the discussion quite well.

Today, I caught a talk from Nico Adams, of Cambridge University, regarding the Semantic Web. It was a good talk and what really got me was that this was a follow on to a great talk by Randy Julian, CEO of Indigo BioSystems, at the AAPS earlier in the week on a very similar note, and also followed on the meeting I had with Jim Karkanias at Microsoft regarding their information strategy and the thinking behind the Amalga platform. While they are all on different paths, they are headed in similar directions and the thinking trend is toward data management at the atomic level. I am looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Sunday Talk at AAPS

The talks went well Sunday for my session with Joel Usansky from Thermo, Jeff Tishler from IDBS and Randy Julian from Indigo BioSystems. The first two talks were predictably product focused, with some tie in to Ligand Binding Assays and general Bioanalytical work flow. When Randy stepped up, he led off with a slide contrasting vacuum tubes and transistors, highlighting the need for something new, as opposed to optimizing the current systems. He then went on to talk about linked data as opposed to the standard static schema architecture of our database systems. He lost a good portion of the audience as evidenced by some of the questions, but the talk was spot on and tied together several ideas talked about earlier.

I am looking forward to following up with Randy when I return from Europe to compare notes.

AAPS - Update from Seattle

The speakers dinner last night was enjoyable and informative. The challenges coming out of the ligand binding labs are the same as those faced by the rest of my clients and center around key information exchange challenges.

As a deliverable set from yesterday, the group discussed several key focus areas, several of which resonated with me.

Data exchange was a hot topic with a desire for standardized information exchange so systems could talk to each other with minimal work. There is already work in the industry on this topic and I pointed to several of the current and emerging transport standards.

Instrument and software validation and the easing of the process was a highly debated topic as it represents so much of an impact for the GLP labs. The options and discussion ranged from validation accelerator packs to FDA recognized validation standards that allow a vendor to certify, reducing the customer level validation to the 20% or less of customization or configuration.

Also discussed was the desire to have a standardized "plug and play" infrastructure for instrument hardware. This spurred a number of discussions around the implications, not the least of which is the need to implement bidirectional communication in the hardware and software layers of the instruments to make this possible. The lack of common standards to build to and a governing body to work with makes this all the more challenging. My suggestion to the group was to not take on this as an outcome, but rather take on a paper with requirements and standards recommendations, that can then be used as a foundation for discussion with the key players. We need to get on the same page with respect to what it means to have integration at the hardware and driver level before we can get to the level of discussing implementation in detail.

All in all, it was good discussion and I am looking forward to my session later today, discussing the ELN and LIMS roles in these and other areas.