New software aims to replace handwritten experiment methods

The not-for-profit organization, the Pistoia Alliance, has announced new software that aims to make pharma labs work more efficiently, replacing handwritten experiment methods with digital documents. The MethodDB project has been launched in conjunction with pharma companies including Bristol-Myers Squibb and AbbVie and is one of the central building blocks in its Lab of the Future (LoTF) project. The alliance has produced the project because in many cases scientists still handwrite their methods, a difficult and time-consuming process, producing documents that can easily be six to eight pages long. Digitising the process so that experiments can be accurately reproduced reduces the room for human error. Scientists often have more than 30 instruments in one lab, each with a different user interface, and will have to spend an inordinate amount of time inputting the variables onto each to reproduce a single experiment. This project enables the digitization of analytical method descriptions, which will support the use of AI and deep learning by standardizing experiment descriptions, increasing data integrity and reproducibility.