The poor principal investigators — the forgotten managers in all of this health IT stuff. They work on the most sophisticated of equipment but record plans and data in notebooks, electronic notebooks or Excel spreadsheets.
That loosely organized and inefficient practice motivated Jonathan Gross, then part of a research group at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to come up with a solution.
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In 2007 he formed a company called BioData to commercialize that solution, Labguru. It’s cloud-based project management software aimed at keeping research plans and results more organized, making inventory easier to track and avoiding clunky handoffs of projects, which often results in information being lost or under-communicated.
With a customer base of academic discovery labs and small-sized biotechs, BioData focuses on the four main areas of science, knowledge, team and logistics.
In the software, a principal investigator can set research questions, protocols and milestones that can be accessed by all of the researchers in his lab. He can assign responsibilities, set deadlines and oversee the progress of experiments. Meanwhile, researchers record all of their experiments, images and notes in one location. A storage location feature keeps track of where supplies are in the lab and keeps order requests centralized.
What separates it from other companies like Accelrys, LabArchives, Quartzy and colwiz that make lab workflow tools, according to CEO Adam Sartiel, is its scope.
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“These are powerful tools for storing data, but they do not provide integrity of information across the team and across the lab,” said Sartiel, former Israel site manager for Invitrogen (now Life Technologies), who joined the company last year. “Electronic lab notebooks are focused around analysis and recording of individual results. LabGuru is a lab-wide solution.”
The next step is moving into the mobile space, according to Sartiel. With an app, for example, a researcher could track down an item in the lab from his mobile phone before he even got there in the morning. Or he could use an iPad to record every step of an experiment and upload a picture of the outcome.
In the future, Sartiel sees BioData moving into the hardware space. He also sees Google Glass becoming a powerful tool for labs and for the company, because it would allow researchers to document everything. But that’s a ways away. “We will keep that for the imagination for right now,” he said.