Thermo's integrative technologies offerings

"Our thrust is on biologics, niche solutions, and systems integration,"

-Himat (Kim) Shah, director of marketing and business development for the informatics business, Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Himat (Kim) Shah is director of marketing and business development for the informatics business of Thermo Fisher Scientific. In this role, he is primarily responsible for guiding the business' strategic product direction, building and maintaining the business' role as a leader in laboratory informatics, developing and building strategic relationships with other solution partners, and directing day-to-day marketing activities in support of it sales teams. Shah shares the strategies.

Can you tell us bout the informatics business of Thermo?

Informatics is part of integrative technologies division of Thermo. Life sciences is one of the biggest markets that this group serves and nearly accounts for 60 percent share of the total business of the integrative technologies' division. The other important markets being served are oil and gas, chemicals, and food safety.

What are the three major thrust areas for the informatics group, more so from an India perspective?

The thrust would be in the areas of biologics, specific-solutions for CROs, and as a turnkey provider and a systems integrator.

Biologics: The pharma and biotech are all important industries for Thermo Fisher. We have a portfolio which includes SampleManager LIMS, an enterprise solution used in laboratories; Watson LIMS, for pharmaceutical bioanalytical laboratories; Galileo LIMS, designed specifically for ADME and in-vitro testing; Nautilus LIMS, used in a range of industrial applications and increasingly by biotechnology laboratories because of its configurability, patented workflows and plate-handling capabilities; and Darwin LIMS for pharmaceutical manufacturing R&D and QA/QC. In addition, we market the Atlas CDS, a multi-industry enterprise-class system integrated with our LIMS solutions for greater accuracy and consistent reporting of shared data, as well as increased productivity.

Custom solutions: CROs in India have integrated set-ups in a single multi-storey building and the number of CROs is on a rapid rise. CROs are all buying Watson, a FDA validated product, for their BA/BE studies. Almost 49 of the top 50 CROs have standardized on Watson. Watson is perfect for the BA studies but it does not have many of the other features that the CRO labs need. For example, the CROs set-ups in India since they are integrated need software for tracking patient registrations, contamination, and managing several other issues; they need software for protocol, clinic data management, resource scheduling, chemical sourcing, etc. So to offer comprehensive software tailor-made to suit these needs we are partnering with a local company in India for clinic management, etc. This is one of our areas of concentration.

End-to-end solutions and services: Today there may be about 60 CROs for BA studies. We think that this number would go up to 200 in the next few years. That means new virgin sites would have to be built. And Thermo Fischer as a corporation has everything that one of these labs needs, starting from a group of people who can design the lab and build the lab physically to instrumentation, validation, software integration, training, and all the consumable from Fischer. We can do a complete turnkey project. But we hadn't thought like that earlier. And we have started thinking in that direction. Basically we would like the lab to give the output specs and we can build, furnish, and have a working lab without any headaches. We would be something like a systems integrator and the lab need not buy products from Thermo alone.