Bigger. Stronger. Faster. Those may be attributes John Lynch, General Manager of the San Francisco 49ers, looks for when deciding which player to draft at cornerback to compete with the Super Bowl Champion Los Angeles Ram’s wide receiver Cooper Kupp. Smaller. Easier. Better. Those are the qualities laboratory managers and directors are searching for when it comes to their lab instruments and equipment. [Read More]

The growing demand for electric vehicles is driving the need for affordable, high-performance energy storage solutions. However, with the cost of raw materials rising, ensuring battery production workflows are cost-effective is critical to maintain competitiveness. Seamless sharing of manufacturing and quality control data is essential for making any production line efficient. Here, we look at how modern laboratory information management systems (LIMS) are improving traceability and efficiency in battery cell manufacturing workflows. [Read More]

A recent theme in a number of recent FDA warning letters has been analytical data integrity. This is more, however, than simply connecting instruments to laboratory software for automatic data capture. Recent warning letters have cited the need to ensure records can only be accessed by relevant personnel, that audit trails are complete, and that all records can be accounted for. Clearly the FDA are taking the ALCOA and ALCOA+ data integrity principles to heart. [Read More]

A picture is worth a thousand words. This adage is common in numerous languages today, but it originated in Norway with Henrik Ibsen, the playwright, whose original quote was “A thousand words leave not the same deep impression as does a single deed.” Over the last hundred years, it has evolved to the form many of us are familiar with. And today, labs everywhere are discovering how true this statement is for their lab data analytics. [Read More]

If your lab is considering investing in a laboratory information management system (LIMS), you might be wondering what exactly the process looks like. Implementing a LIMS is a complex undertaking, but if you know what to expect from such a project, it makes tracking its progress and directing the entire process more manageable. [Read More]

LIMS projects are normally both high profile and of relatively high cost to an organization. This means that Project Managers want to get the best solution at a price within their budget but at the same time making the minimal amount of compromises to the original solution envisaged at the outset of the project. If this balancing act is carried out efficiently then the company will have achieved the best Return on Investment (ROI) possible. Achieving a maximized ROI does not always mean that the system will have 100% of the originally envisaged functionality.  [Read More]

Astrix will be a Gold Sponsor at this year’s World Drug Safety Congress (WDSC) event, October 4-5 in Boston, Massachusetts. Astrix will be at booth 32 and will be discussing services focused on pharmacovigilance. [Read More]

In this 2022 paper published in Frontiers in Nutrition, Andrés-Hernández et al. discuss the development, use, and expansion of the Compositional Dietary Nutrition Ontology (CDNO), a formal controlled vocabulary of terms, definitions, and relationships for better sharing food, beverage, and nutrition data and information. Noting a lack of such an ontology to facilitate "building common platforms that are of practical value to data curators and to end-users searching for relevant information," the authors briefly describe their methods and then discuss the use of the system for data curation and retrieval. They conclude that CDNO provides "a formal representation of commonly used dietary and nutritional terminology" that can "contribute toward data sharing and interoperability, particularly for initiatives where a wide range of foodstuffs are analyzed to diversify diet and agricultural production."