Single System Replaces Multiple Applications
Systems for handling, analyzing, and retrieving data often grow like mushrooms, and also like mushrooms, they can prove poisonous.
Before implementing its Therapeutic Area Database (TDB), researchers with pharmaceutical company Abbott Laboratories Inc., Abbott Park, Ill., captured and stored their data using methods that grew slowly over time and differed from group to group. From the point of view of individual investigators, the system worked fine, at least for a time. But ultimately, the situation stifled collaboration, increased IT support costs, and bogged down the discovery process, according to the company.
By 2000, Abbott decided it was time to make a change and replace these inefficient legacy systems. "There was a grassroots feeling about [dealing with] the fact that we were wasting a lot of time," says James Summers, PhD, divisional vice president of advanced technology at Abbott. An independent survey confirmed that the company could gain up to $10 million of efficiency annually by moving to a centralized system for capturing, analyzing, and storing data.
Abbott ultimately built a new, centralized informatics system that included ISIS, MDL's information management framework; Assay Explorer, MDL's biological data management system; and Report Manager, MDL's application for extracting and organizing data into reports. The new system offers improved access to information across project teams, better data accuracy, time savings equal to one full-time employee per group, and greatly reduced IT support compared to previous multiple systems. According to Summers, however, the greatest value derived from having all of the data in one database is the ability to look at cross-project trends and develop predictive tools based on larger data sets.
Abbott's Therapeutic Area Database uses Assay Explorer to parse raw data via the reader format and analyze it according to the selected calculation model. The platform allows data to be viewed via tables, and visualization tools such as two- and three-dimensional graphs. Data can be further searched and viewed using the form-based ISIS/Base and spreadsheet-based ISIS for Excel. (Source: Abbott Laboratories)
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