AbsoluteProof Eases Process Scientists Follow to "Sign" and "Witness" Volumes of Research Records
Reston, VA – January 28, 2010 -- Surety, LLC, the leading provider of data integrity protection solutions, today announced that Ansaris, a drug discovery and development company, has selected Surety’s AbsoluteProof® trusted, digital timestamping service for integration into its lab informatics systems to protect the data’s integrity and authenticity. With AbsoluteProof, information stored within Ansaris’ electronic lab environment will be properly “sealed,” ensuring its research records are in legally acceptable evidentiary form should the company’s intellectual property rights and ownership to a particular invention ever be questioned or challenged.
Ansaris is a drug-discovery company focused on solving small-molecule challenges by utilizing its proprietary technology platform. The company integrates fragment-based drug design, protein modelling and medicinal chemistry and biology expertise to identify novel therapeutics. Critical to the drug-discovery process is the ability to prove "time of invention" in order to protect intellectual property that is generated.
"Prior to implementing AbsoluteProof, we required scientists to save their experiments to DVD, and then have them physically signed, countersigned and witnessed,” said Joan Lau, President and CEO, Ansaris. “This process was labor-intensive and time consuming. Considering that only 20 percent of our industry has a purely electronic solution for archival, our challenge was to design and implement a lab informatics solution that could satisfy the requirements of proving inventorship."
Using its electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) as a starting point for its implementation of an electronic archival process, Ansaris scientists seamlessly export their experiments to the company’s network, upon which AbsoluteProof then time stamps, or ’seals,’ the document, recording the exact time, date and format in which it existed. The document is then conveniently accessible to additional scientists, who can then view the sealed electronic record. This process assures Ansaris and its scientists that their work is authentic and safe from potential tampering or intellectual property theft. What once took 15 scientists nearly 10 hours per month executing the process, Ansaris’ electronic lab environment with AbsoluteProof integrated into it has since reduced the time to less than one hour per month. This translates into savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
"With AbsoluteProof, Ansaris and its collaboration partners can be confident in the fact that their scientific intellectual property data can and will remain secure with minimal time commitment from its scientists,” said Bob Flinton, VP of Marketing and Product Management for Surety. “Being integrated into the Ansaris’ ELN solution to improve the invention process, Surety’s AbsoluteProof has helped the company reduce the amount of time and resources spent on managing electronic scientific records."
Legally Defensible Proof of Authenticity
As a Surety customer, Ansaris qualifies for Surety’s Legal Defensibility Guarantee, delivering to Ansaris the confidence that its critical electronic records, files and other digital content will withstand the most vigorous legal scrutiny. Under the guarantee, Ansaris will receive access, if needed, to sworn affidavits and expert witness testimony to the quality of the underlying technology, confirming that the Seals provided by the AbsoluteProof service are authentic and have not been compromised, as well as a money-back guarantee should a federal, state or local court in any jurisdiction render a final and non-appealable decision that Surety has not been able to satisfy its claims.
For complete details about Ansaris’ successful implementation of AbsoluteProof, visit www.surety.com/resources/success-stories. For more information about Surety or AbsoluteProof, visit www.surety.com.
About Surety, LLC
Founded in 1994 by leading Bellcore Scientists, Surety is recognized as a premiere third-party trusted time-stamp authority. With millions of electronic records and files worldwide protected under its authenticity seal, the company's flagship service offering AbsoluteProof® enables organizations to meet the legal, fiduciary and regulatory responsibilities associated with creating, managing and archiving electronic data by providing legally defensible evidence of integrity and authenticity. AbsoluteProof ensures against content or record tampering by providing a “digital wax seal” for all types of electronically stored content. The company's client base is made up of pharmaceutical and bio-technology companies, legal and financial services firms, research and development laboratories, healthcare organizations, managed services providers and copyright protection agencies that are ensuring record integrity with AbsoluteProof. For more information, visit www.surety.com.
About Ansaris
Ansaris is a division of Locus Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a privately held drug discovery and development company based in Blue Bell, PA, creating novel therapeutics using its patented drug-design technology. Ansaris has entered into several drug discovery collaboration projects with pharmaceutical partners, and has built a pipeline of early drug-development assets for cancer and inflammatory indications using its computational and medicinal chemistry resources and technology.