Accelerate Pharmaceutical Discovery with End-to-End Scientific Informatics Platform

Mary Donlan
Director Product Marketing
PerkinElmer Informatics

It has long been a goal to free pharmaceutical scientists from tedious manual tasks, nonscientific work, siloed data, and overly complex workflows. The dream has been researchers, project leads, and external partners collaborating and managing their data across an integrated digital ecosystem – accelerating critical insights and discovery.

Such digital transformation promises to spark and speed innovation based on self-service data analytics from comprehensive, integrated datasets.

PerkinElmer Informatics, serving some 4,000 customers with 10,000s of users worldwide, including the Top 20 pharma, has built its Signals portfolio to serve pharmaceutical and biotechnology clients with a truly integrated software suite spanning basic research, pre-clinical and clinical applications.

The Cloud-first suite delivers end-to-end workflows that break down silos and reduce reliance on IT, while helping users work more productively, collaborate, and access more data more easily, yet securely. Designed with a consumer technology experience in mind, it is simple and intuitive for users, enabling them to use the application productively – not spend time figuring it out. For organizations, it enables technology re-platforming or consolidation of solutions, addresses broad use cases, and offers performance at scale.

Signals Research Suite

At its core, Signals Research Suite aligns on the research side with the making of pharmaceutical materials, testing, and decision support by addressing pharmaceutical demands for:

• Data capture and collaboration
• Self-service data processing
• Data analytics and science-based decisions

The suite comprises Signals Notebook, a Cloud-first electronic laboratory notebook for productive, transparent research and collaboration; Signals VitroVivo, the data processing and statistics tool enabling search across all assay, screening, and study data; and Signals Inventa, a next-generation data management system for analysis of scientific results. The underlying Signals DataFactory technology enables the efficient capture, access, and analysis of all scientific results collected throughout the R&D lifecycle. The suite provides chemical and biological analytic functionality as well as advanced query and data management capabilities from assay development to high throughput experiments.

On the drug development side, the suite is designed to take users from biomarker discovery in completed studies through ongoing clinical trials, with applications for clinical data review, medical review, operational effectiveness, and even into safety and risk management. PerkinElmer Informatics is developing the Signals suite to go beyond its exclusive life sciences use of the TIBCO Spotfire visual analytics and discovery platform to increase applications that target and drive clinical processes.

How it helps

Accelerating discovery depends on collaboration around good data, and the ability to focus on science, not software. Science is not a solo endeavor, and Signals Research Suite arms researchers and scientists with an integrated platform to generate and share data and insights.

• It streamlines complex research by integrating all data, structuring it, and making it findable and accessible to be interoperable and reused.
• It enables users to work the way they want, with customizable (but supported) workflows.
• It improves the speed and quality of scientific research with no-code search tools, rich visual dashboards, and interactive analytics and data management.
• It delivers on both security and scalability by using state-of-the-art software components.

Rather than siloed solutions, Signals Research Suite consolidates data capture with visual and statistical data analytics so that researchers can make sense of and collaborate around data for competitive advantage.

Evolve with market needs

Whether it’s big pharma looking to refresh and update its tech stack, or emerging biotech companies looking for the most modern, self-sufficient tools to bring their ideas to market, today’s software must continually evolve with needs. Cloud hosting and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enable frequent software updates so users don’t have to wait months or more for new capabilities. SaaS also means organizations spend less effort managing siloed on-premise hardware platforms and complex software upgrades, while enjoying security and promoting collaboration across sites. The Signals Research Suite is available as a SaaS deployment, for a faster go-live and ongoing benefits.

Then end goal

The primary goal for any informatics investment is to drive better decisions and innovation. With the solution – from data capture, processing, structuring, and management to analytics – can you do better science? Understand your data and results better? Make faster, better scientific decisions? That is the end goal for the Signals Research Suite – an end-to-end platform, designed not only for ease of use but for optimal use, to accelerate discovery and innovation.