“Persistent Systems provides custom solutions for life sciences industries”

—Dr Armaity Davierwala, senior life science domain consultant, Persistent Systems
Armaity Davierwala has been associated with Pune-based Persistent Systems Limited since 2004 as a senior life science domain consultant helping with the domain aspect of various projects. In an exclusive interview with BioSpectrum Armaity shares her views about  Persistent’s life sciences business

Tell us about Persistent’s life sciences business?
The life sciences group at Persistent, has nearly a decade of experience and has effectively combined science and information technology to provide solutions for some of the top pharmaceutical, equipment and medical device vendors. In addition we also strongly work with academia: some of the leading universities and cancer centers. 
  Our life sciences business unit is one of the fastest growing verticals at Persistent, contributing to 10-15 percent of our revenue. We have over 400 people working on projects related to life science. Our team at Persistent includes 40 life science domain experts and several PhDs providing domain support to our several projects.

What are your life sciences product offerings?
Persistent Systems provides custom solutions for life sciences industries. We focus on four main domains viz. bioinformatics, clinical informatics, medical devices and instrumentation, and lab automation. We have expertise in 21 CFR Part 11 and HIPAA, since these are of extreme importance to the Pharma and healthcare industries. We also own a product called ChemLMS, which is a laboratory information management system (LIMS) that is deployed at several pharma companies worldwide.
We are also doing a lot of work around cancer research. We are closely associated with the cancer biomedical informatics grid (caBIG) initiative from its inception. We are one of the leading providers of outsourced product development (OPD) services in the caBIG network, and have been named a caBIG support service provider by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). caBIG is a standards-based nationwide network that provides a grid infrastructure, data repositories, interoperable software and policy guidelines to enable data sharing and collaboration across the biomedical research community, with the goal of accelerating the realization of personalized medicine

Is Persistent active in the LIMS space? If yes what are some of your products and technologies?
Yes, Persistent is very active in the LIMS space. We also own a product called ChemLMS, which is a LIMS that is deployed at several pharma companies worldwide.
In addition we also develop custom LIMS solutions, maintain and enhance industry-standard LIMS, customize LIMS for additional functionality, work flow and scalability; integrate LIMS with different laboratory instruments, data sources, and third party applications and provide support and training.
Some of the LIMS Persistent has worked on include:

• Design and development of a custom LIMS for a public health laboratory for virology.
• Web-based LIMS for managing pre-clinical studies.
• Web-based LIMS for high-throughput labs like microarray, proteomics and flow cytometry.
• Design and development of a caBIGTM compatible biobanking system

What are your plans for the year ahead? Will you be looking for partnerships in this space?
The life sciences industry is seeing an increasing need to develop software tools to manage their data and analyze it quickly and meaningfully to increase their productivity and profitability. 
The greatest concerns to the industry today, are escalating drug discovery costs and thinning drug pipelines. Developing software and predictive analytic tools for identifying lead compounds would enable the pharmaceutical industry to address this concern. Clinical trials are now being performed across multiple geographies and there is a need to manage this data and carry out predictive analytics on clinical trial performance management.
Medical researchers face the challenge of integrating heterogeneous data generated by automated high-throughput technologies and correlating it with patient data to get meaningful information and enable personalized medicine. This approach, called “bench to bedside”, is becoming increasingly popular.