Hosted LIMS for the pharmaceutical environment

Kim Shah tells NGP about the benefits that LIMS-on-Demand can offer to the pharmaceutical industry.

Why is LIMS-on-Demand beneficial to the pharmaceutical industry and which companies benefit most from a web-based LIMS hosted by Thermo Fisher?

Kim Shah. Thermo Scientific LIMS-on-Demand (www.limsondemand.com) is an affordable lab management solution allowing small to medium sized labs, for the first time, to have the benefits of a full-featured LIMS without the expense and time of installing and maintaining an enterprise client server application. LIMS-on-Demand provides the reliability and security benefits of a full featured enterprise LIMS over the internet.

Traditional LIMS often require a capital investment of anywhere from $50,000 to well over $100,000, making this important laboratory functionality simply not available to smaller labs. With LIMS-on-Demand, the costs associated with having this functionality is now within reach since companies only pay for a monthly subscription fee for each user.

As an operating expense instead of a capital expenditure, this subscription-based monthly fee now brings a fully featured LIMS within reach for those labs that have up to now been forced to design their own systems or rely on paper based methods. With LIMS-on-Demand, scientists can access, manage and support the lab from anywhere, any time, and from any web browser.

I expect that small to medium-sized laboratories doing routine testing, with three to five scientists and typically no IT resources, will benefit most from this solution. Laboratories involved in research and development, nutraceuticals, cosmetic manufacturing, environmental monitoring, pathology, water safety and bio-banking will be taking a good look at LIMS-on-Demand.

For those larger companies that have highly customized workflows or must conform to GLP guidelines, a hosted solution is available which essentially offers the same on-demand LIMS, but also completely takes care of the back-end client server management. Many large companies are realizing that this is a time and cost item that can be successful outsourced, along with many other parts of the drug development process.

Are there any limitations with an on-demand LIMS solution compared with a traditional installed LIMS?

KS. Thermo Scientific LIMS-on-Demand is as robust as an enterprise-class LIMS. Working with a SAS 70 certified hosting partner, we ensure that our clients have reliable access to their application and that data will be secure. Customers can create workflows, map simple lifecycles and generate automatic updates while having rapid access to up-to-the-minute data and information that impacts every phase of the laboratory process. Companies needing to conform with specific GLP validation requirements should consider Thermo Scientific’s purpose-built LIMS with GLP and validation already built in.

How is LIMS-on-Demand suited to meeting the changing needs of pharmaceutical organizations?

KS. More and more pharmaceutical companies are consolidating resources and processes. Outsourcing is now a common occurrence which has brought cost savings and efficiencies to the life cycle process. LIMS-on-Demand has been developed in tandem with this trend to offer a true enterprise-level LIMS for those providers now being tasked with the work previously done by only the largest labs with onsite IT departments, large capital budgets and teams of many scientists.

Our solutions have been built on the latest technologies and we partner with companies like Microsoft and Oracle to ensure that we bring our customers the most innovative and easy-to-use solutions on the market. Our breadth and depth of expertise and solutions for the life sciences and pharmaceutical industry demonstrates our commitment to serving the needs of our customers and we have been recognized by Microsoft Corporation for the past two years by receiving their Life Science Innovation Awards for providing next generation solutions that enable our customers to advance science.

No other LIMS vendor has the breadth and depth of offerings we can provide any lab – from reagents, to consumables to high end instrumentation and software solutions – we have the expertise and solutions for the entire lab operation. Now with LIMS-on-Demand, scientists in small to medium-sized labs can access, manage and support the lab from anywhere, any time, and from any web browser, and at a price that is affordable.

Biography

Kim Shah is Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Informatics. Shah has more than 20 years’ experience in high tech marketing and management. Prior to joining Thermo Fisher Scientific in November 2006, he served as Vice President of Marketing and Channel Development at Convoq. Shah has held leadership roles at Inso Corporation, Lotus Development and Micrografx. He also co-founded e-tractions, Inc., a provider of strategy and implementations of online marketing campaigns.