March 12, 2007
Thermo Fisher Scientific
Marc Casper
Executive Vice President:
How has your company adapted and responded to the changing economic climate in the past five years when so many others companies did not?
Specific to our informatics strategy, we acquired InnaPhase Corporation to expand our portfolio to include purpose-built LIMS, particularly for the pharmaceutical market. Customers are looking for most complete solutions, and with our domain expertise in life sciences, we have provided more of the required core functionality in our base software applications to reduce risk of heavy customizations.
We have also continued our new product development, with the introduction of Thermo Scientific brand Darwin LIMS, a purpose-built solution for pharmaceutical manufacturing, R&D and QA/QC. We are working now to shift our pharmaceutical products from individual point solutions to an integrated suite built on a single technology platform based on Microsoft .NET.
What is your vision for the future of the life sciences market over the next several years?
As the world leader in serving science, we will continue to work to break bottlenecks, enable end-to-end workflows, and accelerate time-to-market for customers. Our solutions will respond to the industry’s need to be able to store, retrieve, monitor, audit, analyze, and report on data, no matter where or when or how it was first conceived.
Also, the ability to facilitate knowledge management in a collaborative research and manufacturing environment is important for our customers trying to effectively and efficiently manage their drug pipelines. Therefore it is a priority to us as well.
What products and services does your company provide and what special capabilities do they offer the life sciences market?
We provide total laboratory solutions for our life sciences customers, from sample preparation and analysis to data interpretation. Specific to informatics, we provide enterprise LIMS and Chromatography Data Systems (CDS), desktop spectroscopy software, and PKPD applications that are used to automate the acquisition and management of laboratory data. We offer four distinct LIMS addressed to serve distinct pharmaceutical requirements from drug discovery to development to manufacturing.
Nautilus LIMS is particularly suited to research and discovery environments; Galileo LIMS drives automation of ADMET experiments for high throughput environments; Watson LIMS is the industry standard for Bioanalytical laboratories; and Darwin LIMS offers the functionality required for complex testing in pharmaceutical analytical development and manufacturing QA/QC.
Partnerships are an effective way to track life science advances and ensure that your company delivers timely products and services. Which life sciences companies or organizations have you partnered with or invested in and why?
We’ve recently joined the Microsoft BioIT Alliance, an organization of pharmaceutical, biotech, hardware, and software companies working together to realize the potential of personalized medicine. Thermo Fisher’s informatics business will participate in this effort, working collaboratively to develop industry-wide conventions for sharing data using Microsoft technology. We’re also technology partners with Microsoft and Oracle. We will announce other partnerships in the future that enable us to encompass other best-of-breed technologies and products into a more complete solution offering for our customers.
What are your most exciting products and initiatives in development, and how will they improve life science research?
We are working in several areas that will bring a whole new level of functionality and interoperability to knowledge workers in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. These initiatives and upcoming products will take advantage of next-generation technologies in the areas of information presentation, collaborative workflow and enterprise level knowledge management.
Where do you see your company in five years?
As the world leader in serving science, with $9B in revenue today, we are incredibly excited about the future. We see Thermo Fisher becoming an increasingly strategic partner to the life sciences industry. In the software and informatics portion of our business, we aspire to be the software platform innovator for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries to enable collaborative, enterprise level solutions that fundamentally and drastically improve the ability to develop and bring to market compounds and medicines with unparalleled quality and speed.