Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
an ELN system would be matched by an attractive ROI. Today it is easier
because companies are comfortable with publishing the savings and other
benefi ts that have followed their ELN deployment.
Better access to information smoothes the transition of information between
development and manufacturing, and AstraZeneca reports [24] a 50% saving
in time using an ELN; Kalexyn reports a 25% saving in report creation and
patent preparations. Lilly, an early adopter of the Intellichem product, uses
the system across discovery chemistry and development and projects a $75,000
cumulative net saving per ELN user over the period since deployment. Cloning
of experiments is widely reported as a benefi t and cost saving; Millennium
reports that 50% of new experiments are cloned, and Johnson and Johnson
reports an astounding 90%. BMS was an early adopter of the Intellichem
product in chemistry development and estimates 10% time saving in formula-
tion, analytical, and process pharmaceutical development together with a
20-40% saving in method execution times.
Evidence of the ELN driving equipment standardization is beginning to
appear. Pfi zer determined [25] that it had more than 100 electronic balances
across two large sites in two countries. Previously the purchase decision was
made locally leading to no consistency in the makes and models in use. This
complicated interfacing to the Accelrys notebook. Rather than spend time
providing custom interfacing, it decided on a phased replacement of the bal-
ances, focusing on one vendor and selecting models that were compatible with
the Accelrys notebook. Several other speakers at the 2010 Symyx User Group
Meeting in Barcelona discussed the need to standardize, and Stephen Taylor
[26] introduced the concept of the highly automated lab (HAL). In a not-
unsurprising parody, he illustrated a verbal dialog with HAL, where the system
prevented the scientist from executing a badly designed experiment.
ELN systems are complex to set up and manage. This is a major barrier to
implementation at smaller companies. A solution to this problem is remote
hosting of the application. Accelrys has put in place a hosting environment
and has a number of companies using the approach.
Hosting presents challenges. Security is an issue, but there are proven tech-
nologies that address this. More challenging is communication between local
services, such as a balance, spectrometer, or even the corporate registry, and
the remote application. Once technology can address this communication
barrier, we can imagine a completely hosted informatics system that links the
ELN with registration, inventory, decision support, and data repositories all
remotely hosted.
What goes around comes around! Thirty years ago most computer systems
were based on local, dumb terminals communicating with a remote host (nor-
mally within the company); systems then adopted a client-server architecture
followed by a three-tier architecture. The future seems to be with an externally
hosted server system with local terminals that are used in a relatively dumb
way so that users can connect to their ELNs.
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