(1260-A) Developing a global, scalable, modular, and integrated analytical workflow manager tool

Abstract: After two decades, parallel vintage sample tracking platforms in Discovery Chemistry, originally of in-house design and build, needed an uplift. Our challenges included providing one harmonized solution across different functional areas, maintaining a quick and agile interface, forward thinking for a future-proofed application, filling gaps of critical unmet needs, and broader buy-in across multiple stakeholders. In our return-on-investment hypothesis, increasing automation over our historical baseline applications, would: save time, reduce human errors, elucidate key metrics, be intuitive to use, streamline communications, and complement adjacent automation uplift strategies while avoiding redundancies.

A fully formed commercial-off-the-shelf solution had clear advantages. However, combined with a large scale and ambitious niche of performance needs, no obvious solution-ready product is available on the market. Our conceptual approach started with a blue-sky combination of features across multiple Analytical R&D sites, teams, specializations, and perspectives. Disparate workflows to bring together ranged from newly automating routine purification workflows to supporting sample tracking for assays and certificates of analysis , previously handled via personal communications with no tracking in place. The outcome was a journey across ideas, fact-finding for feasibilities, navigating dynamically progressing global initiatives with potential overlap, and bridging communications across bench scientists, team leaders, business analysts, project management, IT architecture, cross-departmental fundings, and commercial developers.

The product of our intensively collaborative effort meets global scale needs while preserving local scale flexibility for changes, with many unique features to meet new ways of working and working together globally. These claims open a discussion to our top features not found elsewhere and how they work in complement to our existing and upcoming design tools, electronic notebooks, and databases for predictive analytics based on FAIR data.

In this poster presentation, we plan to focus on three features in particular: (i) tracking and recognition of multi-player work from different user perspectives (analysts, requestors, managers, and project teams), (ii) agile batching and unbatching of arrayed samples in real time response to progression through analytical workflows with a record trail of meta-data, (iii) a new ability to follow and troubleshoot sources of individual workflow bottlenecks, and objective measures of successes for sustainability, turnover times, project relevant challenges to feedback to synthesis and design.

As this project moves into its next phases, of theoretical interest is accurately quantifying the impact of the sample tracking changes on drug discovery and candidate drug delivery. Topics such as overcoming investment bias, lack of baseline measures, and confounding variables from dynamic innovations progressing in parallel, need to be considered in an effort to quantify the impact of this automation tool. These future directions leave an excellent opening for conference discussions in sharing ideas and learning from each other.