Thermo Fisher Scientific wins Microsoft Life Sciences Innovation Award for third consecutive year

PHILADELPHIA—For the third year in arow, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. is a winner of Microsoft Corp.'sLife Sciences Innovation Awards, which recognize best-in-classcompanies for their innovative use of Microsoft-based solutions.

Microsoft selected Thermo Fisher, alongwith Emory University, part of the Atlantic Clinical andTranslational Science Institute (ACTSI), as winner of this award fortheir use of Thermo Scientific Nautilus LIMS (laboratory informationmanagement system) to advance information exchange in the clinicaland translational science environment across a diverse set oflaboratories.

A key initiative for ACTSI is theselection and deployment of LIMS across the consortium to support a"virtual bio-repository" environment. The ACTSI implementedNautilus LIMS at Emory University as part of an enterprisebiospecimen management system rollout to enhance workflow, fostercollaboration and effectively manage samples. With the need toconnect many laboratories and external institutions with itsenterprise LIMS, Emory reportedly achieved a level of standardizationwith Nautilus that is replicable across configurations and gave Emoryand ACTSI an informatics solution that will be an important componentof their translational science informatics infrastructure.

The award, was announced at the DrugInformation Association's (DIA) 46th Annual Meeting in Washington,D.C.,

"The Emory/ACTSI implementation takesadvantage of Thermo Scientific WebAccess deployed on Microsofttechnologies to deliver rich client functionality via a web browserto both internal and external users," said Michael Naimoli,director of life sciences industry solutions, Microsoft, inpresenting the award. "In addition, the Study Design Module (SDM)created by Thermo Fisher and Emory using Microsoft tools provides aneasy to use graphical user interface for study design, which allowsthe ACTSI to design workflows more quickly."

The implementation of the Nautilus LIMSsolution reportedly will enable consistent terminology usage andinformation model mapping across different laboratories, allowingintegration with upstream clinical study systems and downstreamlaboratory analysis processes. The solution is said to have resultedin significant cost savings due to reduced maintenance needs andsimpler integration, as well as improving efficiency and dataquality.

Time savings have also been generatedas deployment of a standard base configuration with optionaladditional lab specific configuration minimizes deployment time forinitial lab implementations and use of the new SDM extension willreduce the configuration time for new study protocols by as much as50 percent, providing more efficient management and tracking ofmid-study modifications.

In addition, the audit and traceabilityfeatures of Nautilus ensure regulatory compliance throughout themanagement of research specimens. The ACTSI Clinical InteractionNetwork Nautilus implementation currently supports 117 studyinvestigators/coordinators conducting 47 research studies with morethan 37,000 original samples and more than 102,000 aliquots.