Goldfinch Bio

As part of a focus on developing precision therapies for patients with kidney diseases, Goldfinch Bio had introduced an on-premise electronic lab notebook (ELN) which was used primarily as a document repository.

The system didn’t work as intended and the company was disappointed in the system’s performance. Goldfinch Bio also experienced issues concerning the level of service and support provided, with the cascading number of problems highlighting the need to quickly move to a more reliable informatics solution and provider. Goldfinch Bio also considered what capabilities, which their on-premise ELN was not providing, should be added with a new solution.

The solution

Goldfinch Bio re-evaluated their requirements and introduced The IDBS E-Workbook Cloud platform, which runs on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

“One of the drivers for us, in addition to looking for a higher level of service, was adding capabilities that we knew we would need as a dynamic, growing company that we didn’t have previously. In particular, a big need we wanted to fill was a scalable assay database,” said Adam Tebbe, Senior Director of Informatics & IT, Goldfinch Bio.

“E-WorkBook not only offered just the standard ELN features, but also had the ability to actually load and aggregate the data together across studies and average assay endpoints for replicate measurements.”

Goldfinch now has the ability to load and save different templates for different assays and then report and interrogate the data between the various runs it does.

“IDBS was able to create the environment quickly, and the fact we are able to easily connect to our AWS environment so that our production VPC can talk to The E-WorkBook Cloud is really nice,” said Tebbe.

“Everyone on the ‘Discovery’ side of the company gets an E-WorkBook Cloud account when they get hired. The system is used by chemists, biochemistry and biology. We also have pharmacology and computational research scientists adding data as well.

Goldfinch can now access new features and updates far sooner than a traditional on-premise system allows – improving service and end-user satisfaction. The E-WorkBook Cloud also schedules automatic backups without user intervention, ensuring the integrity and security of critical data.

In consideration of a SaaS deployment, Goldfinch Bio wanted to ensure a cost-effective solution in deploying a new technology.

“We did the analysis and found the total cost of ownership for the SaaS offering to be lower compared to deploying in our own environment,” explained Tebbe.

“IDBS is hosting the solution and is responsible for security and system management, but still allows for integrations in the cloud and ability to talk to it from any applications we deploy in our environment.”

The cloud is also enabling Goldfinch Bio to improve data sharing with its external partners and collaborators.

“Because of the nature of our company, we outsource work to CROs and other service providers.  We also have valuable collaborations with key corporate partners and academic institutions,” said Tebbe.

“We use the Connect module to help us better integrate with these important external parties and improve overall collaboration workflows. We ask everyone we work with to contribute their data into the E-WorkBook to help us consolidate the data from different sources.”