Ocimum Biosolutions announced that its specialty life science Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), Biotracker has been awarded the prestigious caBIG (cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid) Bronze Compatibility Certification by the National Cancer Institute, an institute of the National Institutes of Health, US Department of Health and Human Services.

The overarching goal of the caBIG programme is to develop a truly collaborative information network that accelerates the discovery of new approaches for the detection, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of cancer, ultimately improving patient outcomes. This is done by enabling collaboration between researchers by providing an interoperable IT infrastructure that facilitates data sharing. caBIG provides a set of compatibility guidelines, covering computational interfaces and the semantic description of a data system, that provides detailed guidance on how to build a software system that will interoperate within the caBIG framework.

Being granted a Bronze Compatibility Certification guarantees that Biotracker LIMS is compliant to the caBIG guidelines in each of four areas: Programmatic access to data; Use of controlled vocabularies; Use and accessibility of data elements and metadata; and Availability of a diagrammatic representation of the information model used.

“A critical problem facing basic and clinical researchers today is the explosion of data and how to effectively manage and share this data,” said Dr Howard J Rosenberg, executive director of LIMS at Ocimum Biosolutions. “By attaining caBIG Bronze Compatibility, Ocimum’s Biotracker LIMS provides the infrastructure and interoperability that is so critically needed to promote knowledge sharing and ultimately translational medicine,” affirms Dr Rosenberg.

Biotracker is a specialty Lab Information Management Solution (LIMS) for enhancing productivity and effectiveness in life sciences research laboratories.

caBIG was conceived by the National Cancer Institute as a standards-based interoperable nationwide network that provides a grid infrastructure, data repositories, analytic software, and policy guidelines to enable data sharing and collaboration across the biomedical research community.

Ocimum Biosolutions is a global integrated genomics services company with operations in Hyderabad, India, Gaithersburg, MD in the US and The Netherlands.