BioData CEO on delivering solutions that solve lab-based problems in food & pharmaceutical industries

19 Jul 2018 --- BioData has appointed Steve Yemm as CEO of the company, following a decade of growth in the adoption of its flagship product, Labguru. The secure, compliant, web and cloud-based Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) is trusted by over 30,000 users worldwide who rely on it to plan and document experiments, track progress, streamline laboratory logistics and share results. Yemm believes the food and pharmaceutical industries can greatly benefit from its features.

With two decades of experience in the scientific data management industry, Yemm, a chemist by training, has led field-based organizations for CambridgeSoft and IDBS, worked on global account strategy for Symyx Technologies and established the European and Asia-Pacific business of Core Informatics.

Yemm says: “I am delighted to be appointed as CEO at BioData at a time when we are rapidly building our global presence as a result of wide and mainstream industry adoption of Labguru. This unique, productivity-enhancing tool is proving to be indispensable in helping scientists run their laboratories more efficiently and maximize their research output. We are lucky to have a great user base that provides us with key insights, allowing us to improve continually. We see a bright future in which scientists can focus on efficiently delivering invaluable work, while their data and inventory management is taken care of.”

Speaking to FoodIngredientsFirst, Yemm notes there is a significant requirement across science-based industries for solutions that deploy rapidly, provide return on investment and provide broad horizontal solutions.

“What I saw in BioData was an opportunity to fulfill that kind of requirement. Over the last two and a half years, we have realigned the business to be focused on providing enterprise solutions in a more business-focused fashion.”

“We are already enjoying rapid organic growth of more than 40 percent per annum, but we see a potential to boost that even further,” he explains. 

Being intent on providing a platform that solves a number of commodity problems in laboratory productivity, means that BioData can offer tailored solutions for the food and pharmaceutical industries. 

“Documenting experiments, managing and registering entities, and testing are all very common problems across many laboratories in the food industry,” Yemm states. “These issues are often solved by paper-based processes, but we are providing this broad horizontal platform that solves a lot of those problems in a quick to deploy and economic manner, compatible with mobile devices. Therefore, we are meeting the scientific and IT requirements that we see in food and pharmaceutical enterprises.” 

BioData’s flagship product, Labguru, is a secure, compliant, web and cloud-based, Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) that enables biotech, life sciences, and pharma companies, as well as academic institutions, to run their laboratories more efficiently and maximize their research output. 

With fast and straightforward implementation, Labguru enhances productivity by instantly recording and managing laboratory data and inventory all in one place.

Labguru users benefit from increased data quality, reduced time and costs and secure access anywhere in the world from any device (on any web browser), as well as, ease of reporting and full regulatory compliance.

Having been around for ten years, Labguru is always evolving to adapt to the needs of the industry. “We are customer responsive, most of the features and functions are a result of the customer engagement.  If our clients come up with a compelling request for a functional enhancement we are often very open to doing that proving and building it into our product, so that the whole community of user benefit from it,” he says. 

In relation to trends and technologies in the industry, Yemm maintains that there is an emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) on research processes in particular. “We have a number of clients whom we are discussing with to add that capacity into Labguru,” he adds. 

For Yemm, one of the most significant challenges is having a single platform technology that unites all the data. However, the benefits of saving time and money are valuable: “If your company is growing it may allow you to avoid headcount increases, by adopting technology like Labguru and it will also help you be compliant with regulation and protect your intellectual property,” he continues. “So you have fully documented experiment which is signed and witnessed, this can be a major benefit in defending the major benefit regarding defending the idea you have.”

Smaller companies can realize the benefits even quicker, according to Yemm. “Many of these smaller businesses have the benefit of being a ‘greenfield site,’ so they don’t have to worry about what they did in the past, for example, and so it would mean that the project is considerably less complicated and they can generate business value more rapidly.” 

Looking towards the future, Yemm wants to see BioData “go beyond the segments that we are currently in and really address an electronic laboratory environment which provides a completely horizontal solution to our customers.”

“The vision is to solve a whole manner of problems that exist in that environment in a single platform approach, which is delivered on a cloud, to desktops and other mobile devices,” he concludes.

By Elizabeth Green