Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Corporate sales colleagues would likely call our system something like
enterprise research data management or 'SAP [6] for Research'. We
simply call it LSP - which is short for the Life Science Project.
1.2 Legacy
It is diffi cult to make a clear distinction between before and after LSP, as
the core part of the database was initiated more than 10 years ago.
Internally, LSP is defi ned as the old corporate database combined with
the new user interface (UI) (actually the full stack above the database) as
well as new features, data types and processes/workfl ows. The following
section describes what our environment looked like prior to LSP and
what initiated the decision to build LSP.
Lundbeck has had a corporate database combining compounds and
assay results since 1980. It has always been Lundbeck's strategy to keep
the fi nal research data together in our own in-house designed database to
facilitate fast changes to the system if needed, independently of vendors.
Previously, research used several closed source 'speciality' software
packages with which the scientists interacted. In chemistry these were
mainly centred around the 'ISIS suite' of applications from what used to
be called MDL [7]. They have since been merged into Symyx [8], which
recently became Accelrys [9]. As an aside, this shows the instability of the
chemistry software arena, making the decision to keep (at least a core
piece of) the environment in-house developed and/or in another way
independent of the vendors more relevant. If not in-house controlled/
developed, then at least using an open source package will enable a
smoother switch of vendor if the initial vendor decides to change direction.
The main third-party software package in the (
in vitro
) pharmacology
area was ActivityBase [10], a very popular system to support plate-based
assays in pharma in the early 2000s. Whereas the ISIS applications were
connected to the internal corporate database, ActivityBase came with its
own Oracle database. Therefore, when the chemists registered compounds
into our database the information about the compounds had to be copied
(and hence duplicated) into the ActivityBase database to enable the
correct link between compounds and results. After analysis in ActivityBase,
the (main) results were copied back into our corporate database. Hardly
effi cient and lean data management!
Of course, the vendors wanted to change this - by selling more of their
software and delivering the 'full enterprise coverage'. Sadly, their tools
were not originally designed to cover all areas and therefore did not come
Search WWH ::
Custom Search