ZONTAL: A Powerful Laboratory Data Management Solution

Life sciences companies deal with high volumes of multidimensional data, from high-throughput screening involving millions of compounds and targets to complex omics studies with six or more dimensions, integrating diverse data types to drive precision medicine and revolutionize drug discovery across the entire R&D pipeline. If you’ve ever seen a printout of a gene sequence, you know just how complex that data can be. More importantly, those data sets represent people—individual patients whose lives may depend on the decisions made based on that data.

The laboratory informatics solutions chosen by life sciences companies, like ZONTAL, must be close to omniscient to safeguard this data. In these settings, more data is infinitely better. It is the goal of laboratory informatics solutions for the life sciences industries to remove siloes and provide comprehensive data access.

Why ZONTAL Makes Sense as a CSols Partner

Efficient management and preservation of vast quantities of data becomes key to business success, as well as to ultimate patient safety, when designing informatics solutions for life sciences labs.

The laboratory informatics landscape has changed as modern technologies have evolved. Data platforms have emerged and gained popularity for their ability to ease the integration of many data sources. Life sciences platforms enhance data management, collaboration, compliance, and efficiency while also decreasing your total cost of ownership by easing data preservation and system decommissioning. A platform also supports the crucial goal of end-user (patient) safety in every product your organization delivers.

ZONTAL differs from other data platform offerings because it is a data exchange first, rather than a strict data source. Making the decision of which type of platform to choose could be costly, or the deployment more challenging, because of the interfaces needed. ZONTAL has been designed to interface seamlessly to manage your data efficiently, allow its use by your full organization, and improve scalability. A good use case applies to your intellectual property (IP) and legal teams. They can use the platform to search for and analyze all work in the company, to support an IP protection case. Any department can search throughout the organization’s entire historical record for work already done on a particular topic or molecule.

The interoperability of ZONTAL makes decommissioning older systems more efficient. It preserves your legacy data, so there is no loss of institutional knowledge. Its ability to interface with any system or instrument and its data preservation capabilities lead to a lower total cost of ownership, with faster access to artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities. ZONTAL allows an organization to blend the past with the future, seamlessly.  Data transformation is automated through easy configuration, compressing the daunting time frames that are typical of system decommissioning efforts.

For 25 years, CSols has helped life sciences organizations to optimize their lab data management. CSols has extensive experience with unraveling tangled data pathways that result from the collection of large volumes of data or from mergers and acquisitions that can characterize corporate business lineages.

In adding the ZONTAL platform to their toolset through this partnership, the CSols team can more easily work with you to deploy a comprehensive data strategy. Targeted deployment strategies allow streamlined data accessibility for organizations. Decreasing the system footprint through decommissioning and centralized laboratory data management can now be done faster and more efficiently than before. CSols has deep industry knowledge that clients can leverage to consolidate and effectively mine their laboratory data.

How ZONTAL and CSols Work Together

CSols and ZONTAL have partnered to provide life sciences companies with skilled project managers, solution architects, application engineers, developers, data scientists, business analysts, and validation experts who know the unique challenges of deploying scientific data platforms. CSols team members work closely with ZONTAL to design appropriate platform uses that allow you to optimize value. The following examples of use cases provide an overview of the many ways that ZONTAL clients may benefit from this partnership.

Use Case: Data Integration

In many, if not most, organizations, legacy data often remains inaccessible or obscured, limiting its potential to inform strategic decisions or drive innovation. ZONTAL securely stores all your data in an interoperable format, even from instruments that are no longer in use. This makes decommissioning less of a headache. ZONTAL also can digitize paper lab notebooks and transform that data into a usable form.

Use Case: Cross-functional Collaboration

Your legal team may need access to the same data that your research and development team is working on. Your R&D teams may want to leverage previously performed experiments they are unaware of. Each will have a different need for the data. ZONTAL is both department and source agnostic, meaning that any department in your organization can find value from the data stream. It also does not vendor lock your data; you own the data, futureproofing your data for long-term accessibility by your collaborative teams.

Use Case: Instrument Data Preservation

ZONTAL can ingest data from most instruments or systems of various types.  Examples are data from a plate reader or mass spectrometer. The data is transformed into a standardized, vendor-agnostic format.

How CSols Brings Value to ZONTAL Clients

The institutional knowledge of laboratory informatics and data management available from CSols gives ZONTAL clients peace of mind that their new data platform will be suited to their needs in the era of lab 4.0.

System Integration

CSols consultants are well versed in instrument and system integration. A shift to ZONTAL will take effort from your staff to learn new ways of working with your data. CSols’ experience lets us foresee the challenges, allowing you to derisk your project at the start and meet timelines while moving through the new system learning curve. You may find that some of the data stored in mothballed instruments may not be extracted easily. A CSols application engineer or developer could shorten the duration of effort while you learn the system.

Data Strategy Development

Making effective use of your data isn’t just a matter of throwing it all together and seeing what insights come out. A data strategy should be in place before any changes are made to your laboratory data management systems.

Validation Expertise

In the life sciences industries, regulatory compliance is a must. This is especially true for data archiving, preservation, and management systems. Ensuring the data lineage is traceable from source to use and that audit trails and access security preserve the data integrity through the validation process can be complicated to document properly. CSols has a dedicated team of validation resources who perform this confirmation with, or for, you.

Getting the Laboratory Data Management Solution You Deserve

CSols provides expert guidance to all clients, regardless of which laboratory informatics solution they choose. Our decades of experience with life sciences and biotechnology organizations enhances the services we provide and delivers informatics solutions that are fit for our clients’ unique purposes.