Simplifying And Accelerating The R&D Process With An Electronic Laboratory Notebook

e2v Biosensors is a wholly owned subsidiary of e2v technologies that is developing a range of new products for drug discovery and medical diagnostics. One of these products is Visulife, a benchtop analyzer with integrated biochips and reader that enables the rapid and reliable analyses of proteins. Visulife integrates a number of novel technologies into one platform.

The development of lab-on-a-chip technologies such as Visulife requires bringing together a range of scientific disciplines: spectroscopy, materials and surface science, computational fluid dynamics, microfluidics, molecular modeling, micro- and nano-fabrication, optics, physical and organic chemistry, molecular biology, biochemistry, clinical medicine and toxicology. Creating and managing this breadth of knowledge in a secure, yet easily accessible and collaboration enabling way is a critical part of e2v’s development process. e2v realized that an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN), rather than a paper lab book system, was necessary to accelerate and simplify their R&D process.

Choosing a suitable ELN was much more difficult than e2v imagined. They soon discovered that many commercially available ELNs are not well tailored to their needs. Most are specifically designed for chemists in the pharmaceutical industry and other, less structured, solutions do not provide the quality required for an application so central to their organization.