The new Infotrieve/ELN 2.4 software is in compliance with the US' Food and Drug Administration's code for lab record keeping, according to release notes on the company's Internet site.
Paper notebooks are still being used at a majority of life science companies and R&D organisations despite their poor impact on productivity, collaboration and security, the UK-based company stated.
"When compared to paper and even other electronic systems, the Infotrieve/ELN has been shown in studies to improve operational efficiency by more than 30 per cent at the enterprise level,and to allow biologists and chemists to log experimental data with greater efficiency, to access and integrate it more effectively, and to share it more securely," stated the company'spresident and chief executive, Wes Crews.
The electronic laboratory notebook software package is designed to enable biotech and pharma companies to better manage intellectual property, speed regulatory, quality assurance and legalprocesses and increase the flow of information across departments.
When combined with Infotrieve's web-based search platform, the Infotrieve/ELN allows researchers to augment experimental data entry with information from journals, laboratory product catalogs,gene and patent databanks.
The Internet platform, called Life Science Research Center (LSRC), is a tool designed to simplify research by eliminating the need for logins to multiple information sources including scientificliterature, patents, pipeline news, product catalogs and experimental protocol databases.
The site, which was launched in May, automatically displays the relationships between search results.
LSRC can identify important relationships between data -- for example between a journal article and a patent, said Paul Rennert, the senior scientist at Biogen Idec's department of immunology.
"No other tool allows you to see -- in one place using a single search -- patents, protocols, tools and papers related to any scientific subject," he stated in an Infotrieve pressrelease.