Bringing a new product or treatment to market can mean an investment of many years and millions of dollars for a pharmaceutical or biotechnology company. This research and discovery traditionally has been conducted and witnessed through paper-based processes, but leading-edge companies are turning to electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) and intellectual asset management applications to innovate faster and get products to market more quickly. But if you aren't protecting the integrity of your developed formulas and other content, you risk losing ownership and consequently, your business if you can't prove authenticity.
“The vital nature of patents means that our electronic records must stand up to a legal challenge at any point in the future.” – Andy Sheppard, Head of Operations, Ferring Pharmaceuticals
Protect Intellectual Property from its Earliest Stage
To accelerate their products’ time-to-market, R&D-driven organizations must use the latest laboratory automation technologies while protecting vital intellectual property and trade secrets. Also, they must meet current and emerging regulatory requirements. Therefore, it is critical for companies to guarantee that the documents supporting their intellectual property and trade secrets are authentic and legally verifiable.
In R&D departments, laboratory notebooks are typically used to collect data, record experiments and prove ownership of an invention or trade secret. Electronic lab notebooks have penetrated over 20% of all biopharmaceutical companies.
Investing in an ELN? Before You Do, Contact Us – We Can Save You Money (as well as protect your discovery)!
Most enterprise-class Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) systems can be expensive, cumbersome or even overkill for many organizations. Many don’t benefit from all the ELN’s features, and some never deploy and use the ELNs they have purchased because they do not meet their needs. Before your organization invests in a commercial ELN, take a step back. Consider how you can most cost-effectively and efficiently enable your researchers and scientists to focus on getting world-class products and ideas to market faster in a collaborative, workflow-friendly environment, with built-in intellectual property protection.
Chances are if you have an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system like Microsoft SharePoint or OpentText Livelink, an email system, such as MS Exchange, a database application like Oracle or SQL Server, and Surety’s AbsoluteProof® Data Integrity Protection service, you have ALL of the core components you need to meet the most common objectives of an ELN, without the overhead, costs and complexity of deploying yet another enterprise-class system.
Face it…if you purchase a commercial ELN application, you will spend as much, if not more money customizing it to fit your needs and integrating it into your IT infrastructure. Why not leverage your existing investments in software and applications you already have deployed today and easily tailor an ELN that meets your EXACT needs, and save time, money and resources as a result? Contact us to learn more.
“To ensure the trustworthiness of electronic records, effective management controls must be in place to guarantee their timing, integrity, and authenticity. One must not only secure data against theft or alteration, but be able to prove when the record was created, who created it, who approved/signed it, detection of any changes, and an auditable trail of the record’s lifecycle.” - Michael Elliott, President of Atrium Research and Consulting.