Blogs & Articles

There are countless scientists at the bench right at this very moment who have the next big upgrade to Signals Notebook, Signals Inventa, Signals Image Artist, ChemOffice Professional, Lead Discovery or Signals VitroVivo rattling around in the back of their minds.

How do we know?

Simple. 
You, our customers, are our secret weapon.

For more than 35 years ChemDraw users have been providing essential feedback for next generation upgrades and improvements. Whether in the chemistry, biological research, environmental sciences or food markets, we’ve always sought out the input of those who use our platforms every day.

Users have lots of ideas for useful improvements to the products. We want to hear your ideas and work with you to improve product usability. To do this, we’ve created the Ideas Portal. [You can visit the Revvity Signals Ideas Portal here, and submit ideas or see what improvements other customers have suggested.]

What is the Ideas Portal? 
It’s a customer community which helps drive updates to the products you use. Using the Portal, you can:

• Submit product improvement ideas to enhance product usability
• Vote on other user’s suggestions
• Check the status of submissions

Sometimes we combine a number of ideas into a broader product enhancement, or use submitted ideas as an inspiration for future updates or product usability changes. (In fact, many of our initiatives are customer-driven!)

Another benefit to exploring the Portal is that you gain a better understanding of the product by seeing how other customers are using it.

Which Products Does the Ideas Portal Cover? 
Currently, you can submit suggestions for the following products: Signal Notebook, Signals Inventa, Signals VitroVivo, ChemOffice Professional, and Lead Discovery Premium.

How You Can Reap the Benefits of the Ideas Portal 
While you might not have heard of the Ideas Portal or perhaps have never submitted feedback or a request to a product team, all Revvity Signals users are benefiting from customer-driven enhancements.

A SNEAK PEEK! Currently in development is an overhaul of the Task Management system and Nested Picklists, both of which were frequently requested by customers.

Other recently released customer-requested features include: enhanced previews for internal references, inclusion of the samples as usable chemical libraries for ChemDraw reactions, and many other usability enhancements.

In the short time the Portal has been active, we’ve already implemented 20 ideas in Revvity Signals products!

Overcoming Business Blocks 
There are ‘nice to have’ features (what we call ‘quality of life’ requests), and then there are the ‘showstoppers.’ Showstoppers are ideas which overcome an issue that is blocking your milestones and thwarting progress. For example, a showstopper issue may stop you from rolling out a product to users without the requested feature or enhancement. Showstoppers are not typically addressed in the Ideas Portal, but rather are handled on an expedited basis via Client Service Managers (Services/Support).

If you have a Showstopper issue, contact your Client Service Manager immediately! But, if you’ve got a Quality of Life request, well, the Ideas Portal is the right place for you!

I have an idea. What should I do? 
If you want to submit an idea to the Portal, here’s what you need to know.

First things first: you’ll want to check if your idea has already been submitted. If it has, upvote it!

All of your idea submissions should address the following questions:

• Where is the issue you’re encountering related to your idea?
• What new feature do you think will improve your user experience?
• Why do you want this new feature? (This is particularly important, since it helps the Product Team better understand the issue and determine the best possible solution.) Share why you want this feature, what problem are you trying to solve and how your proposed solution will be used.

Submitting an idea is as simple as clicking the ‘Add a New Idea’ button. Once you’ve filled out the fields, click the ‘Share Idea’ button.

[Have additional questions about using the Ideas Portal? Check out our FAQ here.]

I Like Someone Else’s Idea. 
How do I vote for it or comment on it? 
We designed the Ideas Portal as a community where you can voice your support for other user ideas, in addition to submitting your own. If you see an idea that you feel should be added to the product update roadmap, let us know by voting for it. All you need to do is click the gray vote counter to the left of the idea. (Clicking on the counter again will remove your vote.)

Say you want to add a comment to another user's idea, just click the idea to open it. Enter your thoughts into the ‘Comments’ field and click the ‘Post Comment’ button.

Understanding Ideas Portal Status Labels 
What do the status labels mean? Each submitted idea displays a label indicating the current status of the idea. These include:

• In Review 
  The idea is being reviewed by the product team.
• Already exists 
  The idea is a duplicate for a similar idea submission already in the portal. In this case, a link to the previously existing submission is provided for you.
• Will not implement 
  The idea has been reviewed by product management and a determination was made that the idea will not be added to the product update roadmap. We will include a comment to let you know why this feature will not be implemented.
• Future consideration 
  The idea has been reviewed by product management and is in the process of receiving votes from the user community.
• On Roadmap 
  The idea has been added to our product update roadmap but has not been assigned a targeted timeframe.
• Short Term Target 
  The idea has been added to our product update roadmap and is targeted for release in the next 3-6 months.
• Long Term Target 
  The idea has been added to our product update roadmap and is targeted for release in the next 6-12 months.
• Shipped 
  The idea has been implemented in the product!
• Submitted to Spotfire^® 
  The idea pertains to a Spotfire^® product and has been submitted to the Spotfire^® team for their consideration.

How Do I Know if My Idea is Worthwhile? 
Our tools are only successful when they improve your workflows and work product. There’s no such thing as a bad idea. Your engagement in the Portal is critical for improving product usability, ensuring product development serves your ongoing wants and needs.

If your enhancement request solves a problem you are having, there’s a good chance other users are facing the same challenge. While we don’t incorporate every single product enhancement suggestion, if other users are facing the same issue (upvoting your idea) and it aligns with the product roadmap, the product teams will give its inclusion serious consideration.

How Do I Access the Revvity Signals Ideas Portal? 
Simply visit the Portal and enter your email address in the sign-in field. If you have a Revvity Signals login, enter your email address and password and click ‘Login’. For those who do not yet have an account, enter the requested information under the New User Registration section and click ‘Register”.

Visit the Ideas Portal today to get started improving your favorite tool!

Therapeutics discovery relies on multiple, complementary analytical techniques to best position new drug candidates for commercial success.

Various assay technologies are utilized in the wet lab for their respective strengths. Combining two or more methodologies with different selectivity (an orthogonal approach or orthogonal method which uses fundamentally different principles of detection or quantification to measure a common value or trait) is a key confirmational step in drug discovery to maximize your understanding of a lead candidate’s properties.

In lead identification, an orthogonal assay approach eliminates false positives or confirms the activity identified during the primary assay.

This approach is popular among regulators. The FDA, MHRA and EMA have all indicated in guidance that orthogonal methods should be used to strengthen the underlying analytical data.

What are some common orthogonal approaches?

It is wholly dependent on the chosen primary technique. For example, infra-red spectroscopy is considered a suitable counterpart to mass spectrometry. Orthogonal approaches are an FDA-approved method of confirmation, and each technique performed should complement the secondary technique chosen as a secondary, or confirmational method.

Challenges With Orthogonal Assay Data

Data wrangling is a challenge given the breadth of instrumentation and methodologies available for orthogonal confirmation.

Scientists frequently reference the difficulties of pulling individual results together for in-depth analysis across an entire project. Their tools and data sources can vary; for example, low throughput through ultra-high throughput enzymatic or immuno screening (HTS), High Content Screening (HCS), in vivo studies, Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR), and more. The most important prerequisite for lab data management and analysis is an ability to work with all modalities and data types, allowing users to search and combine results across all assay data from a single platform.

Another key data management challenge facing researchers is the ability to collaborate effectively across different scientific undertakings. Sharing data among assay developers and scientists performing HTS or secondary screening depends on the ability to seamlessly transfer the results of such studies.

Scientists need to combine the individual results of these assays to decide the next steps based on the data – and orthogonal experiments play an important role in the decision making. If the orthogonal methods yield results in agreement with the same conclusion, the data can be trusted, and subsequent decisions can be based on it.

Use Cases of Orthogonal Assay Development

Revvity Signals has worked extensively with partner companies to develop orthogonal assays. On a project with Carterra, researchers worked to improve discovery using HT-SPR to complement AlphaLISA. As a primary method, the AlphaLISA FcRn binding assay is a robust high-throughput immunoassay used to measure relative affinities of therapeutic antibodies to FcRn, to predict the half-life in vivo. The researchers then used HT-SPR as an orthogonal approach to reinforce the findings from AlphaLISA.

Revvity Signals partner companies such as Pelago are also using orthogonal approaches to complement and confirm their own systems. At Revvity Signals, we have been promoting orthogonal approaches for our respective markets for years.

Revvity Signals Research Suite

Signals Research Suite was designed to support researchers from experiment planning through data collection to combined analysis for entire teams.

Revvity Signals Research Suite is comprised of three key tools which work seamlessly together to collect, combine and interactively analyze results from experiments:

• Signals Notebook is an electronic lab notebook (ELN). This is where information about lab experiments is captured and collected.
• Signals VitroVivo transforms the raw data into actionable results.
• Signals Inventa collects the various individual results from Signals VitroVivo, combines and analyzes the data, and generates interactive reports for SAR analysis.

Since High Content Screening can also be a possible orthogonal approach, many Research Suite customers are using Revvity Signals Image Artist in conjunction with Signals VitroVivo. While Image Artist is not officially a part of the Research Suite, customers access, store, analyze and share image data from HCS and cellular imaging systems, then use results of the primary analysis with Signals VitroVivo for profiling image data and hit selection.
 

Data Capture with Signals Research Suite

For assay development, the ability to collect and analyze every assay result type while delivering flexible centralized data and calculation management across assay techniques is essential. All instrument data should be made available through guided workflows with easy configurations – eliminating IT dependency. The entire process from instrument data import to reporting should be processed in minutes.

Signals Research Suite builds on these essential features with cross-study analytics and the integration of in vitro & In vivo data to generate novel interactive candidate nomination visualizations and reports across therapeutic areas. Scientists need complete control over workflows for every technique, modality, and data type. Our objective was to create a platform flexible enough for scientists to use for both one-off assay development and more sophisticated assays, with support for a wide range of techniques and the ability to scale to ultra-high data volumes.

For orthogonal assay development, unified data management combined with rich interactive analytics can prove critical to accelerating and improving drug discovery.

Learn how Signals Research Suite can help your lab solve the unique challenges of assay development during drug discovery.

Creating data is easy. The rapid analysis and use of that data, however, is orders of magnitude more difficult.

Biopharma companies are under pressure from all sides to leverage the power of data analytics. Financial stakeholders expect a timely return on their investment. Regulators are closely scrutinizing the biopharma industry as it explores new therapeutic platforms. Patients and their families are awaiting much-needed cures and life-enhancing treatments.

Getting answers means analyzing oceans of data. The challenge with clinical data is its ever-increasing scope of variety and complexity. The emergence of new clinical trial designs (for example, adaptive design or decentralized trials) has led to more data sources, requiring new data collection solutions that support collection outside of the clinic (e.g., patient-centric systems that don’t require a patient to travel to the hospital in order to report results). The result has been a broad variety of data sources and a profusion of complex data.

Clinical study teams need fast, flexible analytics which provide a holistic view highlighting data relationships as well as a centralized method of collaboration.

The two most sought-after qualities among analytics platform users are speed and flexibility. Can the platform help minimize user time, maximize speed-to-result and accelerate decision-making? Is it also flexible enough to enable innovation, allowing users to discover and visualize hidden insights?

How Biopharma Harnesses Clinical Data

How, specifically, is Spotfire® being used in the management of clinical trials? Companies report using it for in-trial clinical data review, risk-based monitoring, drug safety review, and clinical site performance monitoring – among other roles. At our recent Nexus user conference, clinical analytics leaders from Pharma discussed their use of Spotfire® to harness data, streamline workflows and improve efficiencies.

Our Clinical analytics practice built Spotfire® Solutions to rapidly adapt to different clinical use cases, roles, data sources, therapies, and protocols. So while the individual applications and uses discussed by those companies varied considerably, all of them experienced two primary benefits – speed (the fast!) and flexibility (the flexible!).

The Fast…and the Flexible

Speed-of-results drives the bio/pharma industry at almost every stage of discovery, development, and commercialization. Faster results condense clinical trial data review and improve the timeliness of decision-making. It can also shorten time-to-failure or impact patient outcomes in a healthcare setting.

When it comes to highly varied and complex datasets employed in a clinical trial, the flexibility and extensibility of an analytics and visualization platform has a direct bearing on its ability to handle almost limitless clinical use cases. Dynamic, adaptable platforms can empower medical and clinical data review, clinical operations and pharmacovigilance, Risk Based Quality Management (RBQM), biomarker-based patient/cohort selection, and much more.

• Bristol-Myers Squibb uses Spotfire® to improve their clinical data review time. They experienced a 70% reduction in time for review of standard safety data, improving from hours to mere minutes. They’ve also seen an estimated 50-75% time savings per subject. Spotfire® provided Bristol Myers Squibb’s Translational Bioinformatics Data Science clinical review process with a better understanding of safety, efficacy, biomarker, and response data for scientific clinical review across studies in every phase. It also made it easier to gain effortless insights and dive deep into the data.

They created a dashboard with an integrated 360-degree view of the data in both aggregated and individual levels, improving the ability of reviewers to make informed decisions across the study cycle. The ability to nimbly wrangle the data via the data canvas was also important, allowing BMS to take into account new or future requirements.

• Gilead Sciences turned to Spotfire® to power clinical trial analytics and explore the emerging use of Natural Language Processing to assess drug safety. One of the key challenges confronting Gilead is common to others in the industry – the difficulties posed by huge unstructured data sets. Gilead employs automated natural language processing (NLP) to improve adverse event data collection without compromising safety. Working with a massive dataset, this nascent field of NLP could automate, simplify and shorten drug safety reviews, gather data more efficiently and improve drug safety.
• For Bayer, Spotfire® delivered information in near-real-time, allowing at-a-glance assessments of site performance by clinical research associates. They are using data-driven Site Risk Leveling Indicators for RBQM in combination with their clinical data warehouse.

Dashboards in Spotfire® are built once and then used across different study data for risk-based monitoring, source data verification (SDV) and Source Data Review (SDR). Bayer has more than 750 dashboards used by nearly 600 users across clinical development. With an Ongoing Site Risk Level (OsRL) indicator, they’ve gained effortless insight into adverse events incidence, data entry timeliness, protocol deviations volume, principal investigator oversight, changes due to Source Data Verification (SDV) and much more – at the study, country & site level.

• Clinical departments across Johnson & Johnson’s therapeutic areas use Spotfire® with custom signal detection extensions for medical review. They have deployed a highly customized Spotfire^® environment for review tracking and communications, allowing for faster identification and management of clinical data discrepancies. With visualization, they can immediately spot data outliers – and data can be visualized in multiple ways to serve the preferences of different users.

Fast Speed-to-Result and Fast Implementation.

Speed has two meanings. There’s the notion we discussed above – time-to-result. And there is also the speed of deployment, how quickly the Spotfire^® platform can be implemented and running in your lab.

Revvity Signals Clinical Practice has developed modular solutions for Spotfire^® that can be deployed in as little as six weeks. The line listing review capability can be deployed in 2 weeks, offering the immediate benefit of having an audit trail of your review history.

“Work quickly and adapt alongside me.” What does your dream analytics platform look like?

The bio/pharma industry relies on data analytics across the entire drug lifecycle – from drug discovery and process development to manufacturing, clinical trials and post-market review. Platforms focused on fast and flexible analytics will minimize user time, maximize speed-to-result and accelerate decision-making while enabling both innovation and collaboration.

The Big Pharma companies discussed above built their own clinical solutions in Spotfire®, but there are countless examples of how small and mid-sized biopharma also leverage Spotfire® to improve across the drug discovery, development and commercialization timeline.