Choosing the Best LIMS for Biotech and Life Sciences: A Buyer’s Guide

The life sciences industry operates in an increasingly complex regulatory environment. Regulations are rapidly changing, compliance with industry regulations is non-negotiable, and non-compliance can result in serious consequences for companies, including product recalls, fines, and legal actions. It is, therefore, crucial to maintain Good Laboratory Practices (GLPs) to ensure the quality, reliability, and traceability of experimental data and samples.

GLPs are essential in biotech companies for regulatory submissions, product development, and market approval of the product. However, as laboratories expand, maintaining GLPs becomes challenging. This includes real-time tracking of samples and managing and adhering to stringent standards for various protocols and multiple instruments in biotechnology research.

To address these challenges, the biotech industry requires efficient cloud-based automated laboratory information management systems (LIMS). A LIMS simplifies data management, automates processes, lowers errors, and improves workflows while complying with stringent GLPs and regulatory compliances.

This article lays out what to look for when considering a LIMS to help resolve the challenges faced by life science and biotech laboratories.

Challenges Faced By The Biotech Industry

Whether you are working in drug discovery, genomics research, regenerative medicine, microbiome research, or vaccine development, your team faces the challenges of automating processes to achieve faster results while maintaining data integrity. Additionally, your team must comply with GLPs and establish an efficient, easily automated workflow.

Workflow Efficiency 

Optimizing workflow remains one of the biggest obstacles in the biotech industry. Efficiently managing projects, samples, protocols, experiments, and results reporting while utilizing multiple instruments are all critical challenges to maintaining a standardized workflow. This problem increases with staff turnover, insufficient resources, and lack of management training. 

Experimental Design 

As high-throughput experimentation becomes the norm in the biotech industry, managing manually created sample names and labels becomes extremely difficult. Manual lab processes increase the susceptibility to errors and lack of traceability. Additionally, if your team uses next-generation sequencing, manually tracking data from sequencing runs and using multiple software from different experiments can be challenging. Moreover, managing and monitoring samples throughout their lifecycle becomes an obstacle to compliance and GLPs.

Data Management 

The life science industry generates vast amounts of data. A significant challenge for the industry is managing this data and ensuring that it is accurate. Companies suffer greatly from incomplete/inaccurate data due to human error, equipment glitches, or incorrect inputs. In the drug discovery field, these data discrepancies could lead to incorrect findings about the efficacy and safety of new drugs. Therefore, sound data management is essential.

Data Accessibility and Collaboration 

The amount of data produced in the biotech industry makes collaborative work challenging. Most of the data produced does not comply with the FAIR principle (findable, accessible, interpretable, and reusable). With multiple teams working on different global projects, the accessibility and sharing of large data sets remains one of the biggest obstacles.

Quality Assurance

Labs trying to manage quality assurance (QA) and quality checks (QC) manually or with spreadsheets face difficulties as the team expands. QA/QC includes managing samples, reporting, tracking, document control, instrument calibration, assisting labs with regulatory compliance, and automating quality workflows.

Regulatory Compliance

 Drug discovery is a decade-long R&D process. To ensure a smooth approval process, companies must comply with regulatory requirements set by the FDA, ISO, and EMA. For example, pharmaceutical companies must follow  FDA regulation 21 CFR Part 11 to demonstrate that their electronic records are  “trustworthy, reliable, and generally equivalent to paper records and handwritten signatures executed on papers.”

Scalability

With the rapid growth in the life science and biotech industries, companies are scaling up their operations. They face challenges in incorporating standardized workflows while scaling their business, ensuring that research productivity is unaffected, and maintaining product quality.

How a LIMS Addresses the Challenges of Life Science Labs

The primary role of scientists in the biotech industry is to focus on the scientific work and not worry about data management, workflows, and other manual tasks that can be easily automated with a LIMS. A LIMS helps labs efficiently manage samples, tests, results, and associated data. By implementing a LIMS, biotech and life science companies can centralize lab data, automate manual processes, reduce errors, maintain data accuracy and integrity, and ensure compliance with GLPs.

A LIMS helps your team speed up data access by centralizing data from different experiments and instruments in one place. This centralized data management improves analysis, reduces errors, and accelerates decision-making.

Additionally, a LIMS ensures compliance with QA/QC for biotech companies by providing proper documentation of the entire product lifecycle and adhering to FDA regulation 21 CFR 201 for labeling instructions. It also ensures accessible and accurate digital records and fulfills all FDA and ISO compliance requirements for biotech and pharma companies. Furthermore, a LIMS helps maintain a well-defined chain of custody, which is crucial for the approval of biotech products. Overall, a LIMS is essential to mitigate the risks associated with product development.

Benefits of Using QBench’s LIMS for Biotech & Life Sciences Labs

According to G2’s Top LIMS Rankings, QBench is the best LIMS in North America in 2024. QBench is flexible enough to adapt to your unique workflows and automate your lab to eliminate laborious manual processes and outdated, cumbersome systems.

Biotechnology represents the largest percentage of customer reviews for QBench on G2, and the majority of those are 4.5 or 5 out of 5 stars.

QBench also ranks higher than the category average for Ease of Use, Ease of Setup, Ease of Doing Business With, Quality of Support, and Ease of Admin. Recent G2 LIMS category awards for QBench include Momentum Leader (#1 of 11), Best Results (#1 of 7), Best Relationship (#1 of 12), and High Performer Small Business (#1 of 9).

By choosing QBench, you’re not just adopting a LIMS; you’re embracing a partnership that grows with your lab.

Unlike most LIMS, which release updates only two to four times per year, QBench releases product updates with new features every three weeks. QBench stays close to customers by allowing them to propose and vote on potential new features. Experience the power of a team that is constantly innovating, listening to your needs, and continuously evolving to meet those needs. Ensure your lab remains at the forefront of your industry by picking the category leader.

Below are some of the notable features of QBench that address the challenges faced in the biotech industry.

Workflow Automation 

LIMS automates workflow scheduling, error monitoring, and managing projects, protocols, and samples. LIMS integrates and automates all your lab equipment. This capability reduces data in silos and improves workflow efficiency of multiple instruments. QBench comes with customizable automation, giving you the power to make changes as each lab evolves differently and has its own automation needs.

Sample Management

Biotech companies deal with a vast number of samples for their R&D. A LIMS simplifies sample management by assigning unique identifiers (barcode, QR code) for each sample. A LIMS reads these unique identifiers and helps your team organize the sample accordingly. LIMS also logs each step in the sample's lifecycle from receipt to reporting. This reduces manual errors and improves GLP compliance.

Data Management

A LIMS centralizes data storage and ensures no incorrect entries, as the sample is tracked from the beginning of its life cycle. LIMS follows the FAIR principle, removing in-silos data and making it more accessible. QBench is cloud-based software that gives your team better access to data and ensures data integrity and regulatory compliance.

Quality Assurance and Quality Control

A LIMS enhances quality control by managing SOPs, calibration records, and maintenance schedules. They also ensure compliance with industry regulations. QBench includes a tightly integrated QMS, reducing the IT burden by eliminating the need for two separate software systems for QA/QC. Additionally,  QBench’s no-code automation engine allows a lab to configure automations based on its requirements.

Automated Documentation

A LIMS facilitates automated documentation by ensuring that all data gets entered in a standardized format, sample paths get tracked, integrated SOPs are in place, and all data is stored in centralized databases. QBench, with its configurable and flexible features, allows you to generate reports on the data collected to meet specific regulatory requirements.

Audit Trails For Efficient Regulatory Compliance

QBench records all user activities with time-stamped data entries, modifications, and deletions. QBench’s tightly integrated QMS ensures that all necessary documentation and audit trails are readily available for regulatory inspections. QBench helps labs much more easily meet the requirements for FDA 21 CFR Part 11 and ISO/IEC 17025.

System Integration

QBench includes Business Intelligence (BI) integrations that allow labs to connect their data with modern tools for data analysis, visualization of key metrics, and predictive analytics.

Scalability

As a lab scales up, LIMS can easily incorporate new equipment, handle larger sample inventories, and support more users without compromising data integrity and system performance. QBench’s cloud-based software scalability is seamless, and there is no need to worry about implementing new features and updates as they are automatically updated.

Get QBench to Ensure You have the Best LIMS for Life Sciences Labs

‍If your lab specializes in drug discovery, proteomics, genomics, transcriptomics, agricultural biotech, stem cell research, or vaccine development, or if you use techniques such as NGS, PCR testing, IHC, flow cytometry, ELISA, or cytotoxicity, having an effective management system is crucial. A LIMS is essential for streamlining your operations. If you are looking for a cloud-based LIMS that addresses key challenges such as system integration, regulatory compliance, data management, and sample management, make sure you consider QBench.

Eager to learn more about how to choose a LIMS? Get our free guide on How to Choose the Best LIMS.

Ready to get the Best LIMS for Life Sciences Labs? Schedule a demo today for a comprehensive walkthrough of the QBench platform.