Microsoft has extended an invitation to LSIT friends and colleagues to join executives, industry experts, and your peers on March 8 as Microsoft and Zorch Software present an interactive forum entitled: Regulated Document and Submissions Management in the Life Sciences Industry: Next Generation Best Practices and Approaches, March 8, 2007.

Microsoft has put together an intriguing agenda with industry experts from the BioIT Alliance and special guest Howard R. Asher, President & CEO, Global Life Sciences, Inc. and the founder of the LSIT Global Institute. Howard brings over 25 years of experience as CEO in firms operating in the pharmaceutical industry and a passion for applying information technology to biomedical challenges.

In addition, you will have the opportunity to engage in insightful discussions, a Q&A session, and networking with colleagues. This will be an intimate event with only four seats left! Click here for more information.

In 1936, British mathematician Alan Turing published a paper outlining a simple theoretical computing machine that is widely considered the conceptual precursor to the modern computer. Among the novel capabilities of the Turing Machine, as his invention came to be known, was its capacity to imitate another Turing Machine—a concept he called the universal computing machine. He postulated that given enough processing power, the imitating machine could emulate the imitated machine at a speed comparable to the original machine's performance. Although Turing's original work was strictly hypothetical, anyone familiar with mainframes or who has run a DOS box under Windows XP knows that his model, first devised more than seven decades ago, not only proved viable but has been entrenched in computing for at least 30 years.

As IT professionals working in life science, we are charged with supporting R&D processes that on average span 15 years and ten generations of hardware—a period that typically encompasses significant changes, especially in hardware interfaces to external devices such as laboratory instruments. Increasingly, we are also being called upon to support applications, such as genome searches, protein and receptor docking modeling, cellular activity as a time-lapse video, and chemical compound screening for activity, that present data in more than two dimensions and transcend the ability to capture the data on paper. With the FDA mandating that all data relevant to the development of a drug, medical device or life science product be available for two years after the last of the product is dispensed, it is essential that these "views" of the data collected be recorded so they can be submitted as supporting documentation when the product is reviewed. One of our biggest quandaries is how to support legacy data storage and application viewers that remain accessible on current-generation hardware and operating systems at the same time more and more applications are producing data that cannot be adequately viewed on paper.

Turing's pioneering work may hold the key.

Read the full article here.

We recently welcomed John Kim, Project Manager for Pfizer Research Informatics, to the Technology Advisory Board (TAB). He has also been named Chair of a newly formed "Go-Team" that manages the GIP Guidance Document operations and quality. John is the liaison between the Go-Team and the TAB to address direction, strategy, and content of GIP. John has a charismatic ability to decipher, question and drive the team to results, and has been offering his talents to LSIT almost since our inception.

John, thank you for your dedication to LSIT, and welcome aboard the TAB.