Allotrope Foundation Reaches First Major Milestone in Development of Laboratory Information Framework and Launch of Partner Network

Allotrope Foundation, a consortium of pharmaceutical and biotech companies, has reached the first major milestone in the development of its innovative laboratory information Framework and announced the launch of a partner network to encourage further collaboration.

In just six months, the Foundation has gone from concept to implementation of its first Proof of Concept (PoC) application using the open Framework that will manage analytical data throughout its complete lifecycle using a common set of standard tools.

Allotrope has also established a Partner Network, designed to enable and encourage collaboration with the instrument and software vendor community in developing the Framework.

“The deployment of the first Proof of Concept is a significant milestone on our development roadmap”, said Wolfgang Colsman, CTO of Osthus GmbH and lead architect of the Allotrope Framework. “In about six months of development, we were able to go from an idea to a working implementation.”

Allotrope Foundation aims to make the intelligent analytical laboratory a reality – an automated laboratory where data, methods and hardware components are seamlessly shared between disparate platforms, and where one-click reports can be produced using data generated on any analytical instrument. The Proof of Concept now deployed addresses experiment initiation and data acquisition using instruments from multiple vendors (standard instrument input-output). This PoC also demonstrates the seamless exchange of analytical data between software applications from different vendors. This state-of-the-art data exchange demonstrates several new capabilities, including the simple exchange of data between an Allotrope member and a business partner, for example, a CRO.

“I am really excited to be part of this historic event and of our contribution to bringing the longstanding vision of the intelligent analytical lab one step closer to a reality,” said Janet Cheetham, Executive Director, Analytical Research and Development at Amgen and Board Member of Allotrope. “Seeing the Framework perform as expected in one of our own laboratories validates the core fundamentals of Allotrope’s approach to solving many of the current pain points we are experiencing today with analytical data management in Pharma Biotech and in many other industries that have analytical labs.”

“From the onset of Allotrope Foundation, we’ve been focused on building a sustainable Framework that will enhance how we produce and consume analytical data,” said James Roberts, Senior Scientific Investigator, Analytical Development at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and co-lead of the Allotrope Foundation Core Technical Team. “Using the Framework to embed open standards in our labs, running real experiments in 2014, is the first step to enhancing efficiency, facilitating data exchange and enabling automation.”

The successful deployment of a Proof of Concept also triggers the launch of Allotrope’s Partner Network, which is designed to give all software and hardware vendors an opportunity to provide direct feedback to Allotrope Foundation regarding the Framework.

“We took great care to design a Partner Network that enables all interested vendors to provide feedback on the Framework,” said Gordon Hansen, VP Analytical Development, US and Chairman of Allotrope Foundation Board of Directors. “There has been strong interest from the vendor community in working with us, and we are thrilled to open the doors to such a collaboration.”

As part of the Partner Network, Allotrope provides access to pre-release software, documentation, interfaces and test data.