TiU Highlighted Activities
LIMS Implementation within the Translational Research Environment
The Translational Informatics Unit (TiU) launched its analytical consulting service this year through an ongoing collaboration with the Stokes Institute’s core facility program. Stokes core facilities provide services that support research protocols. Services include routine services such as specimen collection, processing and cell culture and non-routine laboratory assays such as biochemical, genetic and other molecular testing. TiU extends these services by providing tailored informatics support directly to laboratories.
Jeff Pennington, manager of TiU, has worked extensively with the Hospital's Translational Core Laboratory (TCL) to identify clinical and research laboratory procedures that could be accommodated by available laboratory information management system (LIMS) technology. TiU and TCL members, including TCL's technical director, David Stokes, PhD, have completed a discovery phase to formalize the needs of the organization, a technology and vendor assessment phase to challenge various platforms with those needs, and a cross-institutional reference check to query the experiences of several other Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) institutions and fine-tune the selection of the platform.
The project has culminated in the implementation of Nautilus LIMS™ , a highly extensible and integrative LIMS and data management platform developed by Thermo Scientific. Thermo Scientific and Children's Hospital have entered into a partnership to further develop protocol-driven data management applications for translational research laboratories.
TiU plans to use this collaborative experience to formalize the processes necessary to develop similar data solutions for other laboratories and facilities at the Stokes Institute.