IBM and LabBook are teaming up to provide integrated data management tools.
The agreement combines LabBook’s desktop information retrieval, integration, mining and visualization software with IBM’s back-end data management, data integration and Internet infrastructure software. LabBook will optimize its current software tools and develop future tools for IBM platforms and middleware.
According to IBM’s vice president of Life Science Solution, Dr. Caroline Kovac, Open standards are critical to the next phase of genomic research. Our work with LabBook will accelerate the adoption of standards in life sciences by defining a simple, Internet-friendly approach for researchers to access and use genomic data from a variety of sources.
LabBook’s software tools are built on Bioinformatic Sequence Mark-up Language (BSML), an implementation of eXtensible Markup Language (XML), a widely used standard. BSML enables data to be more easily represented and exchanged over the Internet.
According to Dr. Shawn J. Green, CEO and founder of LabBook, The integration of our front-end software with IBM’s infrastructure technology creates the foundation of an end-to-end solution for effectively dealing with the vast amount of data generated by the life sciences researcher.
As the amount of genomic data available swells, it is critical that researchers have the tools to efficiently utilize the newly available information. In order to extract, exchange and use data generated from various sources, standards that identify each piece of data are necessary. By combining IBM’s strength in data management with LabBook’s life science-specific data exchange standards, this offering adds a particularly valuable tool to the assortment currently available to researchers.
Pharmaceutical companies, presented with an overwhelming degree of options, currently invest relatively little in information technology tools for R&D, about 6.8% of R&D budgets. As pharmaceutical companies find it progressively more difficult to operate with increasingly complex data sources and inadequate management tools, investment in this area is sure to grow.
