Dell Electronic Lab Notebook Solution Unleashes Information for Pharmaceutical And Biotech Researchers

Technology Unchains Researchers from Their Desks, Enables Collaboration and Efficiency in Bringing Drugs and Devices to Market


With pharmaceutical and biotech companies spending billions of dollars to bring new drugs to market, many are turning to Dell to help improve their research efficiency and collaboration while helping to lower the cost of discovering new therapeutics through Dell’s electronic lab notebook (ELN) solution bundle.

Dell combines servers and support with its convertible LatitudeTM XT tablets and Rescentris, Inc.’s Collaborative Electronic Research FrameworkTM (CERF), to create a solution that is capable of managing research documents while providing a laptop computer designed to make laboratory records and data readily available throughout R&D organizations. The solution enables labs interested in automating processes, capturing and organizing data, documents, images and lab notes to get up and running quickly.

Dell packages hardware, software and services to provide an innovative solution that is a turn-key package designed to meet the needs of biotech and pharmaceutical companies ready to launch an ELN project. The solution includes Dell’s LatitudeTM XT convertible tablets and PowerEdgeTM 2900 scalable server, along with CERF, the Rescentris ELN solution. Included are CERF seat licenses for up to 10 users along with a fully configured CERF server. With remote configuration and one day of onsite training from Rescentris, a lab can get up and running quickly. The solution can be scaled up to 50-75 users and additional seat licenses can be added. The CERF software is a secure, 21 CFR part 11-compliant system for electronic records and signatures that centralizes scientific content management and record keeping.

By using an electronic lab notebook, researchers are able to capture their data electronically. This capability allows scientists to share information across their organization, helping to prevent repeats of the same experiments in different groups and driving better collaboration. Ultimately this can reduce the amount of time it takes to develop and bring a drug to market. The data is stored on a secure network rather than on the actual notebook, which helps protect the intellectual property and makes it easy to store the data for long periods of time.

“Finally all of the pieces are in place for the adoption of electronic lab notebooks. Too much information is trapped in paper notebooks and needs to be unleashed,” said Scott Jenkins, Ph.D., area vice president of Dell’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Solutions group. “ELNs have the capability to save significant time and subsequently money in the research process, enabling our customers to bring their products to market quicker and save more lives. In effect, we’re taking the ‘re’ out of research and driving collaboration.”

“With this solution, researchers are unchained from their desks and can generate and capture data as it happens,” said Dr. Adel Mikhail, Rescentris chief executive officer. “With cost of developing a single drug running more than $1 million a day, the ability to bring efficiency to research is critical to our customers and the ELN solution presents an easy, scalable solution that can potentially save days in the R&D process.”