NEXUS 2023 EU and NA: Spotlight on Acceleration, Collaboration, Digital Transformation and New Products
Read our recap of NEXUS Europe and NEXUS North America 2023 user events. Explore the latest trends in accelerating scientific research and digital transformation with Revvity Signals in drug discovery, new drug modalities, specialty chemicals, and clinical trial analytics.
Revvity Signals hosted two exciting NEXUS user conferences in October, in-person in Darmstadt, Germany, and a virtual North America event.
What is NEXUS?
With so many challenges facing the research community, keeping up-to-date can absorb significant time and effort. For example, new ways of working with global partners can create issues around data integration and exchange, while lab digitalization is transforming testing and experimentation. At the same time, the rise of AI is reinventing scientific research as we know it and huge transformations are just on the horizon.
To help ease this challenge, NEXUS conferences are all about scientific discussion and fostering connections within our user community, by bringing together the Revvity Signals team, our customers, partners, and users. In short, it’s where we all come together to share experiences and best practices, discuss the latest trends, and review informatics developments.
During the October NEXUS conferences, we heard from an outstanding collection of speakers representing some of the biggest names in science, including, Astellas Institute for Regenerative Medicine. AstraZeneca, CatSci, Chiesi Ltd, DSM-Firmenich, Electronics, Eli Lilly, Exscientia, GSK, Janssen, LabTwin, Merck, MilliporeSigma, Nimbus Therapeutics, Proteovant Therapeutics, Recursis, Revvity, Roche Diagnostics, Scitara, Spotfire, Sygnature Discovery, 20/15 Visioneers and Revvity Signals. Many of the speakers represented organizations that have made the digital transformation leap and are now realizing the benefits of comprehensive R&D and clinical workflows.
We welcome you to read our short synopsis of all the sessions for NEXUS North America and NEXUS Europe conferences. At the bottom you will also find links to watch the sessions from these two great events. We hope you find them as inspiring, exciting and innovative as we do!
>> Keynotes
David Gosalvez, Executive Director, Science and Technology, Revvity Signals, summarized impressive progress made across strategic priorities for the Signals platform and painted an exciting vision for the future. From unified end-to-end workflows to CRO collaboration, new modalities, clinical data management, and AI integration, Signals is innovating to virtually connect scientists across the entire drug discovery and development lifecycle.
Heather Hayes, Signals Synergy Product Leader and Dan Weaver, Director Research Product Portfolio, Revvity Signals, gave a sneak peek at Signals Synergy, a new solution that helps organizations optimize drug discovery between sponsors in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology with their contract partners.
Michael O’Connell, Chief Analytics Officer at Spotfire, discussed the latest AI, NLP, and LLMs innovations going into Spotfire. During his presentation, he illustrated dynamic real work uses of Spotfire that leverage the power of Spotfire in real time. O’Connell concluded his presentation with a look ahead to future directions of Spotfire.
Simone Sharma, Clinical Product Leader, Revvity Signals, introduced Signals Clinical, a new platform for managing, searching, and funneling analytics-ready data into Spotfire. Benefits of the solution include reducing time spent on data preparation thereby accelerating and improving efficiency of data-driven decision making in clinical research.
Michelangelo Canzoneri, Global Head of Group Smart Manufacturing, Merck KGaA, shared Merck’s journey towards data-driven "smart factoring". He discussed key barriers like data silos and incompatible technologies, and how Merck is overcoming these to build the foundations for transformative capabilities like digital twins as exemplified by a digital twin of a bioreactor process that is predicting outcomes and dramatically reducing timelines and costs. This provides a great example of the tremendous value unlockable through connecting data and applying advanced analytics.
>> Product Updates
Dan Weaver, Director Research Product Portfolio, Revvity Signals, illustrated how the Signals Research Suite empowers end-to-end biologics drug discovery and development. Using an antibody-drug conjugate workflow as an example, Weaver highlighted Signals' capabilities for tracking studies, engineering biologics, analyzing complex data, and selecting optimized candidates to advance as drug candidates.
Jun Liu, Senior Marketing Manager, Revvity Signals provided an insightful presentation on Revvity Signals recent work with the formulation consortium. Liu highlighted the comprehensive formulation capabilities within Signals Research Suite that are useful in drug discovery and industrial chemistry alike. Liu also outlined upcoming formulation capabilities focused on formulation tables, work on a formulation library, and much more.
Jen Miller, Senior Product Manager, Revvity Signals highlighted key enhancements to the Signals materials and inventory management system plus gave a glimpse into the future features such as internal requests from inventory, new materials table, and expanded RNA library. Miller stated that the goal of the materials and inventory management system is to optimize workflows by making inventory data easily accessible.
Lindsey Rickershauser, Product Manager, ChemDraw, Revvity Signals, showcased how the market leading chemical communication software, ChemDraw, works together with Signals Notebook to empower scientists working to plan, draw and visualize complex biopolymers comprised of peptides and oligonucleotides using HELM notation. The native integration of ChemDraw in Signals Notebook and Signals Research Suite means that scientists have a powerful tool at their fingertips from drawing to registration.
>> Partner Updates
David Levy, Head of Strategy and Partnerships, Scitara and Gerard Conway, Global Solutions Architect, Revvity Signals co-presented on the Scitara Digital Laboratory Exchange (DLX) and its integration with Signals Notebook and Signals Research Suite. The strategic partnership with Scitara and Revvity Signals enables organizations to seamlessly link Signals to on-prem and cloud platforms, instruments, and data systems.
Jeroen de Hass, Head of Product, LabTwin, delivered a compelling presentation explaining how LabTwin captures structured documentation, guides workflows, interfaces instruments/ELNs, and surfaces information — all conversationally. He illustrated the hands-free nature of the LabTwin Digital Assistant with several videos where he showed a scientist interacting with Signals Notebook via a smartphone and LabTwin.
John Conway, Chief Visioneer Officer, 20/15 Visioneers, delivered a pragmatic presentation on digital transformation. Conway summarizes common struggles like poor data stewardship, technical debt, and change resistance. He advised constructing a data/process strategy, instilling FAIR principles, and securing stakeholder alignment — not just implementing applications.
NEXUS Europe 2023 Main Session Presentations
Sylvana Suisse, Digital Project Lead, DSM-Firmenich, showcased DSM’s journey to implementing Signals Notebook globally across diverse labs and how switching to an agile approach and close user engagement bought about success. Rapid development iterations based on real user feedback meant a platform tuned perfectly to enhance workflows. Local teams felt empowered to customize within a global core and close user ownership and engagement throughout drove adoption. And the outcome? A unified ELN implementation that boosted productivity, data availability and insights across DSM’s labs.
David Nogales, Head of Technology Strategy & St. Louis Hub Lead, Merck KGaA gave a visionary presentation about the potential capabilities of a "digital twin" for scientific experiments. This involves formally defining experiments through modular building blocks that are machine-readable to enable automation, data collection, and AI assistance. By rethinking experiments as standardized processes, efficiencies can be dramatically improved over manual approaches.
While work remains to fully realize this vision, it paints an exciting future powered by digital connectivity and intelligence.
Marijn Sanders, Business Technology Lead, The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, discussed how Signals Inventa and Spotfire are incorporated into a screening hit triage platform to help accelerate the drug discovery process.
Rebecca Rae, Senior Scientist in Advanced Drug Delivery, Pharmaceutical Sciences, R&D AstraZeneca Gothenburg, covered AstraZeneca's plans to implement the Signals Notebook ELN and the benefits for formulation development. AstraZeneca saw Signals Notebook as a solution for connecting siloed formulation data across teams and capturing better connected data, providing significant advantages over current ELN systems.
Jörg Kuharev, Principal Data Scientist, Merck KGaA, described how Merck configured Signals Notebook to enable external partners to document experiments directly within isolated workspaces, improving real-time visibility and collaboration and unlocking the potential for insights and productivity.
Yi Sun, Head of IT R&D Applications, MilliporeSigma, showed how implementing Signals Notebook they saw better collaboration through centralized data sharing, real-time data access for faster decisions, reduced errors/duplications via automated data entry, streamlined workflows with customizable templates, and improved efficiency so scientists can focus on research.
>> NEXUS NA 2023 Track 1: Life Science
Kashif Hoda, Director of Informatics & Nina Mucciolo, Senior Research Associate, Research Informatics, Proteovant Therapeutics, shared how the startup Protevant Therapeutics tackled daunting informatics challenges by unifying ELN, registration, inventory, dashboards, and data flows on Signals and Spotfire, despite limited resources. With collaboration and automation as cornerstones, Protevant accelerated CRO processes from days to minutes while establishing consistent data workflows.
Gabriel Gonzalez, Senior Scientist, Translational Development, Astellas Institute for Regenerative Medicine, highlighted how his team developed templates in Signals Notebook to streamline and increase traceability of workflows for their complex RNA sequencing operations involving multiple teams.
>> NEXUS NA 2023 Track 2: GxP Environments
Alycia Hargraves, IT Manger, Eli Lilly, discussed the implementation of a new electronic lab notebook (ELN), Signals Notebook, in a regulated environment at Lilly. Hargraves covered the full process from selection to deployment, highlighting the efficiencies gained in areas like IT support, mobility, and change management. Her presentation serves as a model for other organizations looking to maximize usability and compliance with a modern, compliance-ready ELN like Signals Notebook.
Jen Kraljevich, Research Labs Product Manager, Roche Diagnostics presented their implementation of Signals Notebook in a GxP validated environment. A common belief in the industry is that validating enterprise software can stall innovation, especially with regular vendor updates. In Kraljevich’s presentation, Roche Diagnostics overcame this perceived challenge by embedding quality checks into agile delivery of Signals Notebook across global R&D.
>> NEXUS NA 2023 Track 3: Analytics Use Cases
Baird McIlwraith, Laboratory Informatics Scientist, Revvity, illustrated how Revvity uses Signals VitroVivo and R to expand cancer cell screening services. When Revvity wanted to expand beyond their OncoSignature cancer cell line screening platform, they turned to Signals VitroVivo combined with Signals Notebook to expand their scientific capabilities and develop new solutions to the market.
Alex Benzel, Scientist, Chemistry, Nimbus Therapeutics used Spotfire to assess external resources and drive solutions at Nimbus Therapeutics. He described how sponsor organizations that heavily rely on CROs need tools such as Spotfire to track vendor performance. By accessing data loading rates, turnaround times, and chemistry productivity, Nimbus implementations were able to get better results — faster workflows and accelerated drug discovery powered by data.
>> NEXUS NA 2023 Track 4: Clinical Analytics
Debu Baruah, Associate Director, Data Analytics, GSK delivered a thought-provoking presentation advocating for the cultivation of "clinical citizen data scientists" armed with analytical capabilities and domain expertise to empower scientists for greater power in analytics self-service paradigms for clinical research.
David Nick, Principal Consultant Life Sciences Practice, Recursis, described the rising trial volume and complexity, disjointed data flows that increasingly encumber clinical teams. His advice to clinical analytics practitioners was a simple but powerful solution — work backwards from study outcomes. Focus on key performance indicators and then figure out how you can build Spotfire analytics and visualization to deliver the insights that you need.
>>NEXUS Europe 2023 Life Sciences R&D Track
Alastair Pate Associate Director Data Visualisation and Analytics, Exscientia, shared how Exscientia is leveraging advanced Spotfire capabilities to solve complex challenges around usability and dashboard customization.
Sam Whitmarsh, Director of Analytical Science and Digital Transformation, CatSci, shows by tapping into Signals Notebook API, CatSci built custom dashboards, connected analytical workflows, and piloted machine vision to digitize reactions. Together this is accelerating productivity and insights.
>> NEXUS Europe 2023 Chemical / Material R&D Track
Dr. Mark Goulding, Program Director, R&D digitization, Electronics, Merck, detailed Merck Electronics' journey to implement Signals Notebook Inventory via structured pilots and close collaboration to meet critical enterprise inventory management needs.
The result was an integrated platform replacing disjointed legacy system and with global standardized inventory management anchored in the ELN, Merck is seeing enormous benefits for efficiency, safety and insights.
>> NEXUS Europe 2023 Lab Automation Track
On the NEXUS NA 2022 Technical track, AbbVie and Nimbus Therapeutics explored Signals Platform tools to better manage massive datasets.
Dr. Bolek Zapiec, Associate Director for Data Science Merck Healthcare KGaA, shared a real-world example of using automation to improve productivity in Merck's R&D labs. By using TetraScience and Signals Notebook to eliminate manual steps in repetitive compound QC workflows. By taking this approach they achieved time savings of over 10 minutes per 100 plates along with faster processing and dramatic error reduction. The productivity and data quality improvements allow scientists to focus their time on innovation versus repetitive tasks.
Matthew R Crittall, Lead Scientist, Sygnature Discovery, explained how Sygnature has customized Signals Notebook for its workflows across 1000+ scientists, including tailored access controls and templates. Crittall also highlighted Signals' flexibility in serving diverse needs across chemistry, formulations and client projects.
Freya FreeStone MChem, Data Architect Scientist, Chiesi, Ltd, showed how Chiesi uses Spotfire to create dashboards and support analytics from a variety of data sources, with a key benefit of such an interactive dashboards being real-time visibility.
>> NEXUS Europe 2023 Workshops
Pierre Morieux, Chemistry Product Marketing Lead and Linda Kewitsch, Sr. Informatics Product Sales Specialist, Revvity Signals, shared a live demonstration on how Signals Notebook is enhancing capabilities for working with biopolymers like peptides, oligos, and nucleic acids using the HELM notation standard. This included visualizing structures, managing curated monomer libraries, and registering new entities derived from existing ones. This provides enormous benefits for the emerging biopharma landscape compared to traditional ELNs designed just for small molecules. With its arsenal of biopolymer visualization, registration, tracking, library management features and inventory management, Signals Notebook seems ready to propel biologics research into the future!
Colin Fyffe, Product Marketing, Integrations & Interfaces, Revvity Signals, showcased a live demonstration showing how Signals Notebook APIs can be leveraged to extend capabilities and automate workflows. The demonstration also showed that by using external lists, custom actions, and notifications, you can build an integrated system without writing any code!
The live demonstration showcased the power of APIs for easy ELN integration and automation. Workflows spanning instruments, databases, analytics systems etc. can be built to standardize processes and reduce manual efforts, all while retaining custom logic tailored to unique needs.
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Chris Stumpf
Senior Principal Marketing Professional, Revvity Signals Software, Inc.
Chris Stumpf is a Senior Principal Marketing Professional responsible for Marketing Programs at Revvity Signals Software, Inc. Chris has over 20 years of experience in the Analytical Instrumentation and Informatics industry spanning Pharmaceuticals & Life Sciences to Chemicals & Materials. He has a Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry and Mass Spectrometry from Purdue University.
Mary Donlan, Ph.D.
Executive Director, Product Marketing, Revvity Signals Software, Inc.
Mary Donlan, Ph.D., leads the Product Marketing team at Revvity Signals. She has 20+ years of Life science enterprise software experience in marketing, business development and field applications. She holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from University of Pennsylvania.