Dotmatics announces major expansion of biologics capabilities
Dotmatics, a provider of scientific informatics solutions and services, announced major global biologics capabilities and the addition of key personnel and workflows that allow discovery teams to capture experiments, processes, and improve decision-support based on a more comprehensive view of project data. The new workflows leverage Dotmatics Bioregister, Dotmatics Studies, Dotmatics Inventory, Dotmatics Browser, Dotmatics Vortex, Dotmatics Cascade and Dotmatics Studies Notebook.
The company also announced aggressive hiring in the biologics space, including the addition of Andrew LeBeau, Ph.D., Senior Manager of Biologics Marketing. Andrew has more than 15 years of experience including director positions at Illumina’s Enterprise Informatics Business Unit and Dassault Systèmes BIOVIA.
“Pharmaceutical and biotech companies have greatly increased investments in the development of a variety of biologics and chemically-modified biologics, but in many organizations informatics systems that can handle biologics have not kept up, and scientists have become reliant on ad-hoc solutions such as ExcelTM, Sharepoint, paper notebooks and other point solutions,” said Andrew LeBeau. “The result is that many scientists lack the tools to efficiently track processes, experiments and entities to leverage the huge volumes of data being produced. We are addressing this vital need with a biologics suite and a team of experienced and talented individuals.”
“While lab workflows are complex and a suite of products is required to capture workflows, the software cannot be equally complex or it will simply not be used,” said Stephen Gallagher, Ph.D., Dotmatics CEO. “We are offering the integration of application capabilities to minimize the number of user interfaces. As an example, customers can use Bioregister and Inventory as services from Studies Notebook templates rather than requiring a molecular biologist to use multiple interfaces.”
Several workflows, such as those used in a typical antibody discovery process, are provided out-of-the-box and only require configuration to each customer’s specific procedures. Other workflows can be built as service engagements using the integration and configuration capabilities within the Dotmatics suite.
Specifically, the Dotmatics offering solves five major informatics challenges in biologics discovery including complex workflows, breadth of scientific data types, need for simplicity, access to data and analytics, and dispersed research environments.
The complex workflows challenge is solved by ensuring that solutions map to the key steps in the workflow and are fully integrated and capable of moving data across individual processes and teams. The challenge of the breadth of scientific data-types is solved with Dotmatics Bioregister that allows for flexible therapeutics definitions, including antibodies, conjugates, chemically modified nucleotides and peptides and others that are used in the discovery process (e.g., cell lines and vectors) to be correctly represented and captured in the software.
Simplicity and ease of use is critical, and some organizations have vendor applications in place for specific parts of the workflow. Dotmatics’ informatics solutions solve this challenge by providing RESTful APIs that allow the same level of integration in multivendor environments. To address data silos, access to data, and analysis, Browser integrates all the biologics project data from various Dotmatics and third-party databases, including experiments, sequences, and assay results. Additionally, Vortex provides integrated, standard bioinformatics analysis in an easy to use, graphical package designed for end user scientists.
Lastly, Dotmatics’ biologics offering addresses the challenge of dispersed research by supporting distributed teams and locations across pharmaceutical, biotechnology CROs, and academic labs with its cloud hosting and collaboration capabilities.