Just west of Boston, Marlborough is known for industry and innovation. This town, incorporated in 1660, is home for the New England Innovation Academy and the software company Scitara, which helps labs, including ones for bioprocessing, make the most of their data.
David Levy, global product manager at Scitara, says that the company “provides a digital communications infrastructure that basically allows our customers and partners to connect all the different types of resources in a lab—informatics applications, simple devices like pH meters and titrators and monitors, as well as the diverse variety of PC-based applications that are out there.” For bioprocessing in particular, he says, “there’s a lot of data that gets generated from many different places, and what we’re finding in our conversations is that the data tends to be scattered over a lot of different resources.”
By aggregating a bioprocessor’s data—along with the data generated by all of the associated instruments—a company can correlate its information. Levy says that provides “the ability to extract and leverage that information more efficiently.” The actual information varies with every lab, because every bioprocessor might have a different portfolio of applications and different bioreactors. “There’s going to be different scenarios that they want to tackle, and we can flexibly address those,” he says.
To work with a new bioprocessing customer, Scitara starts by identifying the desired workflows. “Then, you look at the endpoints, so you know what devices need to be connected to capture the data,” Levy explains. That can include using an open platform connecter to capture bioreactor data in discrete intervals over time to then correlate with analytical results from samples. After analysis, that data must go to where it’s needed.
Once Scitara sets up a data system, the goal is for the customer to be as self-sufficient as possible. For administrators, the interface can be very simple or more sophisticated, even allowing scripting, but it all depends on what a customer needs. In some cases, a bioprocessor might require more options to work off-site. In working with partners, Scitara found that “its technology brings the ability and the power to enable working remotely,” Levy says.
