Exciting Partnership Announcement!
The Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) Partners with LabVantage to Digitalize Forensic Laboratory Workflows
As part of its IT renewal initiative, the NFI is not only upgrading existing systems but also introducing new capabilities to enhance forensic operations.
The Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) is enhancing its commitment to innovation and reliability by partnering with LabVantage to digitalize its forensic laboratory workflows. This strategic collaboration is a key element of NFI’s broader initiative to renew its IT landscape, not just by upgrading existing systems but also by introducing new, advanced capabilities.
A crucial part of this digital transformation is the implementation of a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS). Currently, the process involves multiple manual registrations across different systems, which can lead to time-consuming tasks and potential inconsistencies. The new LIMS will streamline workflows, ensuring that data is efficiently recorded and utilized, improving overall clarity and saving valuable time for all involved.
Peter Blom, Chief Information Officer of NFI, expressed his enthusiasm for the project: “This partnership marks a significant milestone in our journey to innovate and improve our forensic services. By integrating a sophisticated LIMS, we are setting a new standard in forensic science.”
Michel Gerlicher, President, LabVantage International, added: “We are proud to work alongside NFI in their mission to enhance forensic operations. This collaboration will bring about a new era of efficiency and reliability in their laboratory workflows.”
Additionally, a senior LabVantage executive also stated: “We are excited to realize the real-life impact our investments in industry-specific solutions bring to our clients. With SaaS becoming the de facto delivery standard, we expect vertical solutions to prove increasingly impactful, allowing clients to benefit from the latest innovations without being held back by past adaptations required by industry-agnostic software. NFI’s validation that our Forensics solutions are fit for purpose is encouraging, and we are humbled to contribute to the fact-finding mission of NFI’s world-leading forensic laboratories.”
The signing ceremony for this partnership took place on May 30, 2024, with key representatives from each organization. In the picture above, from left to right:
1. Peter Blom – Chief Information Officer, NFI
2. Niels Goderie – Sales Director, Protinus
3. Maarten van As – Former Sales Director Healthcare, LabVantage
4. Pablo Derksen – VP, Head of Public & Transport Services, Capgemini
In this transformative project, LabVantage is partnering with Protinus and Capgemini. Protinus served as the IT broker, while Capgemini will be responsible for developing the sovereign cloud where LabVantage’s LIMS will be installed. This cloud solution is designed to meet the stringent BIO (Baseline Information Security Government)
and BBN (Baseline Security for Enterprises) compliance requirements, ensuring the highest standards of information security and data protection.
LabVantage, along with Protinus and Capgemini, will make sure the new system is secure and meets all necessary standards. NFI will continue to lead the way in delivering reliable forensic services to organizations around the world. The new LIMS will streamline processes, enhance accuracy, and improve data management, reinforcing NFI’s commitment to innovation and reliability.
About The Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI):
The Netherlands Forensic Institute is dedicated to providing high-quality forensic services to support justice, peace, and security. The NFI has achieved this position by constantly improving its products and services. Science and innovation at the NFI are strongly driven by experiences from forensic practice. Through this innovative approach and commitment to excellence, the NFI serves both national and international clients, offering a wide range of forensic products and services. For more information, visit https://www.forensischinstituut.nl/.
About LabVantage:
LabVantage is a global leader in providing laboratory informatics solutions, including LIMS, to enhance the operational efficiency of laboratories. With a focus on innovation and customer satisfaction, LabVantage supports organizations worldwide in their digital transformation journey. For more information, visit www.labvantage.com. For more information, visit www.labvantage.com
Synthetic biology has also become a critical part of the development lifecycle in areas such as cancer research and cell and gene therapies. It offers powerful tools for engineering and manipulating biological systems, allowing researchers to design and construct customised therapeutic agents with enhanced precision and functionality while enabling the development of novel approaches for target therapies.
But how can pharmaceutical R&D departments accelerate the development of personalised therapies tailored to individual patients’ genetic profiles and disease characteristics?
Leveraging LIMS for Faster Results
Laboratory information management systems are essential to precision medicine because they perform vital functions of
streamlining data management, integrating laboratory processes, and facilitating the efficient analyses of patient-specific information. A LIMS enables seamless tracking and management of patient samples, genomic data, and clinical information, enhancing the accuracy and speed of diagnostic testing, treatment selection, and therapeutic monitoring in personalised medicine approaches.
These benefits can be further enhanced by seamlessly integrating a semantic search engine with LIMS, a synthetic biology platform, and an ELN to unlock the full potential of your data. This has three significant benefits for R&D in the realm of precision medicine:
- More Efficient Data Retrieval: Better recognition of the meaning and context of data via a semantic search engine can enable researchers to quickly search and retrieve relevant information from vast amounts of data stored in diverse systems, including LIMS, ELN, synthetic biology platforms, private data warehouses, recent publications, chemical searches and more. This includes retrieving experimental protocols, previous research findings, molecular structures, and clinical data related to specific diseases or genetic variations.
- Knowledge Discovery: By leveraging semantic technologies, the LIMS search engine can identify hidden relationships, patterns, and insights within the collected data. This can help researchers discover new biomarkers, genetic variants, therapeutic targets, or potential drug candidates.
- Cross-Platform Integration: Connecting the search engine to LIMS, the synthetic biology platform, and ELN facilitates seamless data integration and interoperability. Researchers can access and analyse data from different sources simultaneously, enabling comprehensive analysis and correlation of experimental results, genomic data, and clinical information.
We’ll dive deeper into semantic search and its benefits in an upcoming blog post. For now, let’s focus on how this seamless integration eliminates the barriers that may be holding you back.
Overcoming Common Drug Development Challenges
The three advantages detailed above are beneficial in and of themselves because they streamline the pharma R&D lifecycle. In addition, they deliver added value by helping you move beyond common challenges like these:
- Data Silos: Integration addresses the challenge of data fragmentation by connecting different systems and enabling seamless data exchange.
- Data Overload: Semantic search enables efficient data retrieval, filtering, and analysis, saving time and improving research productivity.
- Data Complexity: Integration tackles the complexity of molecular data, such as genomics and gene expression profiles. Semantic search algorithms enable efficient data processing and interpretation, leading to faster identification of meaningful patterns and biomarkers.
- Knowledge Fragmentation: An integrated system promotes collaboration and knowledge sharing, fostering a collective knowledge base that enhances reproducibility and accelerates discoveries.
- Treatment Design: The integrated system facilitates the retrieval and analysis of patient-specific data, enabling researchers to tailor treatment strategies based on individual patient characteristics.
- Collaboration Barriers: Integration fosters collaboration by providing a shared platform where researchers can easily access and contribute to data, protocols, and findings — breaking down barriers and promoting knowledge sharing.
- Compliance: Providing access to relevant scientific literature, clinical guidelines, and regulatory information, helps researchers navigate regulatory requirements by ensuring compliance and safe implementation of personalised treatments.
- Reproducibility and Validation: Streamlining access to previous research protocols, data, and results enhances reproducibility, allowing researchers to validate findings and build upon existing knowledge.
- Decision Support: The integrated system serves as a decision support tool by providing researchers with relevant information, facilitating evidence-based decision-making.
- Translational Bottlenecks: The integrated system expedites translational research by facilitating collaboration, personalised treatment design, and efficient data analysis, leading to faster translation of research into clinical trials and patient care.
Increasing Research Efficiency
LabVantage integration streamlines precision medicine workflows, reduces manual data retrieval and analysis, and enhances research efficiency. As a result, you can focus more on generating insights and developing innovative therapies and spend less time searching for and managing data.
A single system also allows for greater resource optimisation by integrating multiple fragmented information silos, eliminating redundant data storage, improving data accessibility, and maximising the value of existing infrastructure. This leads to cost savings and more efficient resource allocation.
Product Update Note! LabVantage is currently developing a Synthetic Biology suite of tools that will include support for gene engineering including the development of plasmids and vectors and the creation of synthetic biomolecules. By leveraging these tools along with semantic search provided by the LabVantage Biomax system AILANI, pharmaceutical R&D organisations can accelerate the development of personalised therapies tailored to individual patients’ genetic profiles and disease characteristics.
Are you ready to revolutionise your precision medicine R&D? Contact us today to learn more.