Biosyntia won more time for science by choosing Scifeon
When Danish biomanufacturing and research company, Biosyntia, replaced their old LIMS with Scifeon, the gains were immediately obvious.
Automated data collection, centralized storage and automatic calculations resulted in dramatic time savings. Scientists gained the ability to analyze data across experiments, increasing the value of research data. And the implementation and customization process led to an end-to-end rethink of research and laboratory workflows.
“We all save heaps of time using Scifeon. I personally save a lot of time with my data visualizations; I don’t faff around in Excel as much as I used to. And because it is a centralized platform, the colleagues that I work with can simply access the platform when they need data, instead of having to ask me. It saves us all a lot of time.”
Katie Smart, M.Sc. Research Scientist
ABOUT BIOSYNTIA
Biosyntia is a Danish biomanufacturing and research company. Developing and applying unique technologies and world-leading fermentation processes, they produce various B-vitamins and selected nutraceuticals with several unique claims. Founded in 2012, the company currently employs some 20 ambitious scientists specialized in strain engineering, fermentation optimization, bioprocess development and more, running complicated metabolic engineering projects.
“All the calculations that used to be done manually are now done automatically. When I did data processing before we had Scifeon, I ended up having 20 different Excel sheets open, and that made my computer crash. Scifeon has put an end to that.”
Linda Ahonen, Ph.D., Analytical Chemist & Lab Manager
BACKGROUND FOR CHOOSING SCIFEON
Biosyntia initially used another data management system, but as the company diversified from molecular biology into fermentation, they found the old system inflexible and unable to scale with them. ‘It was very good at databases, plasmids and sequences, the rest was quite chaotic,’ one scientist recalls. In addition, the old system couldn’t capture fermentation data, link to analytics, or combine any of the many modules Biosyntia’s fermentation specialists needed to use to analyze data across experiments. To compound the misery, usability was a serious issue as well. Explains another scientist: ‘I could never find anything in the old system. Unless you knew exactly what you were looking for and where to look, you could forget about finding old protocols.’
“By implementing Scifeon, we now have more streamlined workflows, particularly in fermentation, because we’ve taken the time to discuss how we wanted to set up the platform.
Setting up the system made us have these very useful discussions, because now we all know exactly how you should start your experiment, upload your data, visualize it, and organize your data at the end. Having a proper data management system saves time, even if it takes a little time to set up.”
Daniel Bonifacio, M.Sc., Research Scientist
THE COLLABORATION WITH SCIFEON
Today, Biosyntia’s scientists benefit from Scifeon’s advanced data management system offering automatic data capture at all points, powerful analytics and informative visualizations, as well as the abiliy to analyze data across experiments. The platform has been customized exactly to Biosyntia’s processes, from designing experiments through chemical analyses and Quality Control.
The implementation and customization process has been a close collaboration between Scifeon’s science and software engineering specialists, and Biosyntia’s scientists – the platform’s end users. The collaboration is ongoing, with new functionalities in development and occasional troubleshooting. ‘Depending on the problem, I have had fixes that took less than 15 minutes. If it’s hindering workflow it’s fixed very quickly,’ explains one scientist.
”While some of our staff were still struggling with our previous solution after using it for over a year, they are finding Scifeon immediately useful and easy to understand.”
Dr. Hans Genee, Chief Science Officer, Biosyntia
FERMENTATION MODULE SPECIAL FEATURES
Scifeon’s Fermentation module makes it possible to see and compare manually entered variables alongside real time data and track its development live. In addition, the Fermentation module’s customizable graph setup makes it easy to define graph colours, number of graphs and what data is being visualized.
For more information, please visit www.scifeon.com or contact Thomas Boesen at +45 5124 9454 or boesen@scifeon.com