Based in Queensland Australia, QIMR Berghofer is a medical research institute specializing in cancer, infectious disease, mental health, and chronic disorders. Like most research laboratories, QIMR Berghofer uses Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) to manage their research data. Processing, storing, and analyzing the data on all donors, samples, hypotheses, experiments, and results of studies, their LIMS is the backbone of the laboratory.
Traditional LIMS, however, are built on relational databases and their brittle infrastructure can’t keep pace with rapidly changing data and hypotheses. Although research studies are rigorously planned, over the course of any given study biologists may need to collect different types of data or evolve hypotheses to follow an intriguing thread that emerged during their research. The inflexible data model in a relational LIMS couldn’t respond to these changing research needs. Data became the bottleneck to innovation.
Now, Stardog powers QIMR Berghofer’s LIMS allowing constant and fast iteration on data models, data definitions, and types of data. No longer constrained by a fixed relational schema, researchers are more productive and possess a complete picture of their samples, data, and hypotheses. The lab’s data management can dynamically respond to the needs of the research, instead of contorting the study to fit in the inflexible data model.
