Thermo Fisher Scientific named a Microsoft pharmaceutical and life sciences innovation award winner for informatics
Thermo Fisher Scientific is the winner of a Microsoft 2008 pharmaceutical and life sciences innovation award in the discovery and product innovation category.
The award honours best-in-class companies that have made the most innovative use of Microsoft-based solutions for breakthroughs in business processes and practices throughout the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry.
Together with AstraZeneca, Thermo Fisher Scientific says it is pleased to be acknowledged for their contributions to advancing science.
The award, announced at the Drug Information Association's (DIA's) 44th annual conference, was presented to Thermo Fisher Scientific and AstraZeneca, and it recognizes the companies as examples of true innovators in their approaches to solving some of the major challenges facing the global life sciences industry.
"Whether it is the challenging regulatory environment, dispersed silos of information or changing dynamics within an organization, life sciences companies today face enormous challenges," said Michael Naimoli, US life sciences industry director, Microsoft.
"Thermo Fisher Scientific and AstraZeneca are recognized at this year's award ceremony for exemplifying how technology built on the Microsoft software platform can help address these issues by empowering people to better connect, collaborate and make informed decisions to drive business success".
Building on the Microsoft software platform, the Thermo Fisher and AstraZeneca application demonstrated a compelling solution that streamlined the early phase discovery process and greatly accelerated decision-making in discovery and drug delivery.
AstraZeneca is a major international healthcare business engaged in research, development, manufacturing and marketing of prescription pharmaceuticals and supplier for healthcare services.
With more than 13,000 R+D employees spanning eight countries, centralising biochemical screening operations across its global R+D centres creates a host of challenges.
Typically managed at the local laboratory level, the effort to harmonize disparate processes to record, track and manage a growing number of requests for compound screening was identified as a major hindrance to productivity.
AstraZeneca implemented Thermo Scientific Nautilus Lims (laboratory information management system) to centralise biochemical screening, map laboratory workflows, and dramatically drive efficiency through superior data management.
Built on Microsoft's Visual Studio .net, Nautilus Lims helped coordinate global requests, automate workflows and standardize biochemical screening.
Within six months of the deployment, AstraZeneca realized a 180% efficiency gain across its laboratories from the centralised screening process.
"Nautilus allows us to turn our data around faster and test across multiple targets, so chemists can get an answer more quickly.
"This 'centralized screening' approach helps to prevent the progression of inappropriate chemical series, while identifying unexpected leads, ultimately accelerating the research on promising compounds".
"This process has the additional cost-saving benefit of chemistry and bioscience resources that would have been expended on a failed result," says Roger Clark, senior scientist in the cancer and infection department at AstraZeneca.
"The biochemical screening team at AstraZeneca has truly 'raised the bar' within early drug discovery, and Nautilus, along with the Microsoft .net platform, is fundamental to this activity".
