July 20, 2008
| Bio-IT World > Champions 2.0
Champions 2.0


March 12, 2007

Marc CasperThermo 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.

Click here to login and leave a comment.  

0 Comments

Add Comment

Text Only 2000 character limit

Page 1 of 1

White Papers & Special Reports

definiens briefingon-76Next-Generation Technologies Revolutionizing Oncology and Diagnostics
underwritten by Definiens

This “Briefing On” collection of Bio-IT World features, commentaries and analysis, presents some of the latest thinking on high-throughput technologies that are being applied to the fields of research and drug discovery, with particular emphasis on oncology, diagnostics and imaging technologies. Download now at no charge compliments of the underwriting sponsor, Definiens. Download This Free Paper



gq nxt gen seq

This Bio•IT World Briefing On “Next-Generation Sequencing,” underwritten by GenomeQuest, Inc.,
presents a selection of feature stories, interviews,commentaries, conference reports, and editorials on the emergence, opportunities, and challenges posed by high-throughput sequencing. Covered in this collection: the launch of new platforms from Applied Biosystems and Helicos; new applications of nextgen sequencing; the rise of personal genomics; and informatics solutions to vexing problem of managing the vast volumes of next-gen data.  Download now 



Life Science Webcasts & Podcasts

GenoLogicsgenologics 2 translational
Enabling Translational Research Informatics

Learn about the challenges facing life sciences research labs to manage their translational research data:

  • The trends for organizations to adopt informatics solutions for translational research.
  • The unique requirements with managing complex data and workflow.
  • What labs should consider when reviewing informatics solutions for translational research.
  • Which life sciences research organizations are successfully adopting an informatics solution.

Download Now



More Podcasts

Job Openings

Assistant Editor (Science Writer)~Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI), Needham, MA, 
Cambridge Healthtech Institute seeks an assistant editor (science writer) who is an ambitious, dependable journalist who can fulfill a range of writing and editorial duties for a series of eNewsletters covering various aspects of the biopharmaceutical industry in addition to CHI’s flagship publication, Bio-IT World magazine.  This is a superb opportunity to make important contributions to the growth and success of a multimedia science publishing group, while gaining invaluable experience in multiple facets of the publishing industry.   Interested candidates should submit a cover letter, including 3 writing samples (attached in Word or PDF format), salary history or requirements, and resume to kdavies@healthtech.com. 

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center: IT Business Analyst III
The Hutchinson Center is the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in the Pacific Northwest. Through our Tumor Research Initiative, we are finding new ways to detect tumors at an early stage.  We are presently seeking an experienced IT Business Analyst to assess technology needs for the Tumor Research Initiative, and to identify and design improvements to computer based systems.  For more information please visit www.fhcrc.org and search for Job# AD-21465





For reprints and/or copyright permission, please contact RMS, 1808 Colonial Village Lane, Lancaster, PA;

(717) 399-1900 ext 100 or via email to bio-itworld@theygsgroup.com.