The past decade has seen dramatic progress in the development of factory scale life science and drug development technologies, including DNA sequencing, genotyping, gene expression and proteomics. These new approaches and technologies are enabling researchers to conduct experiments that will generate a tremendous amount of data. Additionally, researchers are increasingly interested in understanding the biological relationships between the various technologies. However, technological advancements in Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) have not kept pace. Novel, effective, and flexible, workflow-based laboratory information management systems are critical to both the success of each individual high-throughput environment, but perhaps more critical to the cross platform biological analysis in the drug discovery process.

Amersham Pharmacia Biotech, in partnership with Cimarron Software has developed a family of workflow-based software products that addresses the challenges of managing genetic and DNA-based information for the gene and drug discovery processes. The Laboratory Workflow System (LWS) will accelerate the creation, modification, automation, and re-use of laboratory data collection and provide a framework for cross platform analysis activities. The LWS technology is capable of delivering laboratory and analysis workflow systems that are highly configurable to meet the exact needs of each clients's environment.