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Last updated: April 23, 2008
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Pittcon 2008 Wrap-Up

ELNs Continue to be Hot Topic; More Web-Deliverable LIMS Featured


The premier conference and exposition on laboratory equipment and chemical analyses in North America, the Pittsburgh Conference (Pittcon) was held this year at the Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, LA from March 2-7, 2008. Once again, there were a number of LIMS and Informatics sessions, short courses, workshops, and tutorials available to feature the latest in LIMS and Informatics as well as laboratory and data automation.

Pittcon has long been the place to launch LIMS and Informatics solutions in North America. Thus, vendors do their marketing best to create buzz about new products and highlight recent enhancements. It is also a place for European vendors to test the market for their solutions in the US.

This year, more than 1,100 exhibitors showcased their products and services on the Pittcon exhibition floor, with almost 40 Informatics vendors showcasing their solutions in the Informatics arena.

New LIMS

Several vendors launched new and enhanced versions of their LIMS.

ChemWare launched Version 10 of their HORIZON Oracle-based LIMS. User-configurable without custom programming, HORIZON LIMS automatically captures electronic records from instruments, scanners and other data sources across the enterprise, integrating the content into compound documents, publishing reports via the web portal, and providing self-service, no-programming query tools and management dashboards for highlighting key operations performance indicators.

LabWare unveiled their new Version 3.0 of LabWare WebLIMS which delivers the benefits of thin client computing through a zero footprint Web browser client and the ability to run on virtually any Web device. A Visual Workflows engine helps to train new users quickly. In addition, an Enterprise Web application can adapt to specific corporate computing standards. WebLIMS serves as a powerful new presentation layer within the LabWare LIMS product suite and is compatible with customer’s existing installations of LabWare LIMS.

PerkinElmer touted numerous incremental improvements to their LabWorks LIMS Version 6.0, introduced a new LABWORKS Green LIMS specifically for the biofuels industry , and announced a major corporate green initiative called EcoAnalytix. Hurricane Katrina had a significant impact on this company, and this new philosophy is the result. The company has a new focus on the global ecosystem that will affect how they design and sell their products. Rather refreshing and definitely something to applaud. So their attention is not just on instrument performance, but also how it is used, and how that use can create the least environmental impact. They highlighted some fun and cool applications of their products for oils testing on Honda Racing Team’s Formula One racing cars as well as testing of 100% fuel grade ethanol in Indianapolis race cars.

Quality Systems International (QSI) featured their new WinLIMS.NET Version 7 ready-to-use, right out of the box web-based solution. WinLIMS.NET is a web-based system with many new features, including more query tools, the ability to design the dashboard similar to Google Zones functionality, SmartSearch, interactive Excel functionality, and more.

Thermo Fisher Scientific added significant new functionality enhancements to Darwin LIMS, their purpose-built LIMS designed specifically for pharmaceutical QA/QC. Now harmonized on the .NET format, Darwin 3.0 now also fully integrates environmental monitoring data into the batch record for pharmaceutical QA/QC, enabling laboratory managers to react rapidly to non-conforming product before it reaches the consumer. In addition, Thermo’s Nautilus LIMS has a new interface and now offers true ad hoc queries. Here too, the user can now configure templates for their actual workflows, so no need to write custom code.

All the vendors had something to say, but .NET seems to now be the driving standard and the pendulum seems to be swinging once more towards SAAS web-deliverable LIMS solutions. After the well-defined but ill-fated attempt by Neolytica in 2003 to bring a web-deliverable solution to market before the market was ready for it, the market is finally ready and similar solutions that leverage current technology are now available.

But SAAS web-deliverable LIMS weren’t at the center of attendee interest; instead Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELNs) generated the most traffic in the booths and in the Informatics sessions.

Other New Lab Data Solutions

Interestingly, there were only a handful of ELN solutions featured at the show.

CambridgeSoft featured their specialized ELNs, including their Biology E-Notebook, LIMS E-Notebook, Chemistry e-Notebook, and Process E-Notebook solutions for specialized market applications. E-Notebook provides a smooth, well-organized interface designed to replace paper laboratory notebooks. With the CambridgeSoft E-notebooks, users can easily insert content from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Acrobat PDF, ChemDraw and structured data in lists and tables. Forms are configured with any combination of these. Oracle or SQL support allows organizations to share data, as well as maintain rigorous security and efficient archiving.

Labtronics featured their Nexxis qELN, an electronic lab notebook specifically designed to eliminate the paper associated with manual routine procedures in the laboratory.

Velquest demonstrated their SmartLab GMP Electronic Notebook System which eliminates QC process paperwork, replacing it with electronic data capture that can be checked as it is acquired and shared across the enterprise. All instruments are integrated and the system works with existing LIMS and ERP systems.

Agilent touted their Kalabie ELN which they purchased from the Klee Group in 2007. A digital laboratory notebook, Kalabie ELN provides a foundation for knowledge and process management as well as intellectual property protection within laboratories. It centralizes and secures all data from experimental work with a high level of traceability. The focus for this product, which is Agilent's first electronic notebook, will be on the pharmaceutical market and some chemical applications.

CSols, the consulting organization, also tinkers with software and introduced a new QAvalid solution that provides automated compliance and management system. An enterprise compliance management that enables users to convert documents to structured format so they can be utilized online and can be linked to a LlMS or an SDMS.

Waters launched their new NuGenesis Empower 2 and highlighted the new NuGenesis SDMS Intelligent Procedure Manager, a workflow software package designed to guide a laboratory analysts through routine, comprehensive method SOPs and integrate results with a chromatography data system. Waters emphasized the ever increasing role of informatics during their presentations. “More and more software is key to interoperation of the lab of the future. Waters promotes the open exchange of data,” said Mary Ellen Goffredo, Waters’ Senior Director of Systems Product Marketing. “SDMS is at the heart of that architecture with their NuGenesis Empower 2 that enables a number of instruments to be functional on this platform and promotes open exchange among instruments, vendors and departments.”

STARLIMS Corporation introduced a new SDMS (Scientific Data Management System) module that is integrated into their web-based LIMS. The STARLIMS SDMS creates a comprehensive platform to manage scientific and laboratory information, consolidating data and documents from the full gamut of laboratory processes. The company claims that the STARLIMS solution is unique in that it integrates LIMS data and SDMS documents into a single web-based platform, replacing the silos of information that are still a problem with other SDMS solutions.

Sessions & Presentations

The Laboratory Informatics sessions were extremely strange to attend this year. The content was generally good, but attendees did not sit through an entire session, rather they roamed from presentation to presentation. Hence the Lab Informatics session would have 40 attendees at one presentation, 100 at the next, and 30 and the one after. Very strange. Looking at the topics, it appears that the ELN sessions were the ones that drew the most interest. Unfortunately, attendees did not necessarily learn more or much about the topic in the two ELN presentations since both were provided by vendors who were pitching the benefits of their solutions without providing an overview of general ELN features, etc.

What’s always interesting in any presentation is how they treat their product. John Helfrinch’s ELN presentation, for instance, showed the VelQuest ELN at the center of the data universe. A CDS vendor would have shown how the CDS was the center of all data management activities. The Waters SDMS diagram above shows SDMS at the center of the data universe. And so on. Naturally since the LIMSource’s focus is on LIMS, that’s what we feel should be the center of the universe, mainly because all other data collection and acquisition activities must feed into the LIMS in order to manage, analyze and report the data in a coherent way….

Of note was the LIMSource’s observation after Pittcon 2007 last year that there was much more interest in ELNs than any other product, and this remained the same in 2008.

Conference Highlights

The Conferee Networking sessions which premiered in 2007 were expanded from eight to 27 in 2008. The LIMS Conferee Networking session was attended by some 20 people around a U-shaped table, everyone facing the moderator. Very intimate. Attendees report the session was very helpful. Questions ranged from very basic how-to queries to complex, sophisticated discussion points from long-time LIMS users.

Posters were once again in the middle of the exhibit floor, and social mixers were again held on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Some 10,677 non-exhibitor attendees visited Pittcon in 2008. Attendees numbers are down, but that’s in relation to past Pittcons – it is still larger than any other venue and still provides exceptional value to attendees. The key is to provide greater value by providing a more robust program and a warmer setting.

Next year – which marks Pittcon’s 60th year of operations – the conference will be back at McCormick Place in Chicago, IL from March 8-13, 2009. For details, visit http://www.pittcon.org.