From Paper to Electronic Lab Notebook With Labfolder

Gathering data on a lab bench seems simple but often results in a lot of fragmented notes, post-its, and comments in the margin. Notes may be complex to retrieve afterword.

People, like Simon Bungers, worked on the problem to develop software solutions named electronic lab notebooks, or ELN in its short version. To better understand how ELNs work and how it can be used, we asked a few questions to Simon Bungers, actively involved in making the life of scientists easier.

Briefly, can you introduce yourself and your background?

My name is Simon Bungers and I’m the co-founder and CEO at Labfolder. Prior to starting Labfolder, I used to be a molecular biologist at the Max-Planck-Institute of Experimental Medicine. It was during my Postdoc work that I started getting frustrated with the status quo in research data management, and decided to work on a solution.

What is the mission of your company?

Labfolder wants to make it easier for researchers to record findings and allow them to focus on making new discoveries. We started by building a very simple digital replacement for the traditional paper lab book, but are now expanding that to a full-fledged productivity & collaboration platform for scientists.

What do you offer?

We offer scientists an electronic lab notebook with smart productivity features such as protocol templates and advanced search. It also has a strong focus on usability, allowing anyone to start recording their experiments digitally without any training.

With its rigorous data security and integrity processes, Labfolder makes it easy for researchers to comply with FDA, ISO & GMP/GLP standards.

To which field of research does it apply? What kind of researchers may be interested in your tool?

We are focused on life sciences, and support tens of thousands of researchers from 40+ countries from academia, biotech startups, research hospitals, pharma companies, non-profits, and so on.

What is its main advantage?

I used to have to retrieve past experiment data by looking through the dozens of paper notebooks we had stored in our lab. This took hours and hours.

With Labfolder, you can find your research data in seconds. Any data point, experiment, protocol or material that you or your team has been working on in the last years. You can basically ask Labfolder “Show me all the PCR primers for the WT1 gene, where the annealing temperatures are between 65°C and 72°C”, and you’ll get all the relevant information with 1 click.

What do your users say?

I could give you a lot of positive customer quotes, but I think it speaks a lot more volume about our customer satisfaction when I can proudly mention that we’ve been highlighted as the Max Planck Society’s Service of the Month. We are very happy with the support of our Max Planck user community which has grown rapidly over the last year and are proud to assist them in their focus on excellence in research.

What are the alternative solutions to your tool? Who are your 2 biggest competitors?

The market is very fragmented, and there are many niche players that are each serving different scientific specializations. I think this is a big reason why adoption of ELNs is still so low - you need to spend a lot of time investigating which option is the right fit for your lab.

To address this problem, we have done three things:

1. Our ELN addresses the most important needs that are shared by all researchers, making it a product “for the masses” instead of a niche product.
2. We built our product with a modular approach, making it possible for everyone to customize the tool to their needs. If you want inventory management, we have an app for that. If you want messaging functionality, we have that too. But if you don’t need either of these, you can disable these apps and have a very simple and uncluttered user experience.
3. Finally, to guide research organizations through the complicated buying process associated with ELNs and LIMS, I decided to write an online guide on the electronic lab notebook that covers the most important questions.

Do you plan a major update in the near future?

We’re continuously releasing new features and making our digital lab notebook smarter and easier to use. I’ll have to keep you in suspense about which features are coming next, but you can follow us on Twitter where we always announce all our exciting news!

The last word?

I’d like to invite all researchers to sign up for our free version and see for yourself how easy it is to transition from paper to digital.