June 30, 2025
About LabKey
If you’re running a biotech lab, chances are you started with tools that were fast, inexpensive, and familiar: spreadsheets, Google Docs, maybe even paper notebooks. In the beginning, those solutions worked just fine. But biotech research moves quickly — and as you grow, the cracks in your data systems can start to slow you down.
So how do you know when it’s time to level up to an electronic lab notebook for biotech? Here are five clear signs your lab has outgrown patchwork systems — and why a biotech ELN might be the next step forward.
1. Your Data Is Getting Lost or Fragmented
You’ve probably seen this play out:
- A file lives in one person’s inbox.
- A protocol was only updated on someone’s desktop.
- Your experimental notes are saved under “Final_v3_REALfinal.xlsx.”
If your scientists are constantly retracing steps, recreating past experiments, or trying to piece together what happened last month, you’re losing time and risking the integrity of your research.
A biotech ELN solves this by giving your team a shared, searchable workspace for protocols, results, notes, and attachments. No more guessing where to find that key figure or trying to decipher someone else’s spreadsheet formulas.
Real-world example: A growing oncology startup realized they were spending over 10 hours a week just locating previous experiment records — until they centralized their data with an ELN.
2. You’re Creating Valuable Intellectual Property
When your research has commercial value, proper documentation becomes more than good lab practice — it becomes legal protection. If you’re preparing for patent filings or fundraising, you’ll need timestamped, tamper-proof records.
Manual logs and Word docs lack the traceability needed for due diligence or legal review.
A biotech ELN has features that create a permanent, secure record of your work — complete with version histories, access controls, and electronic signatures.
Bonus: If your IP was developed in collaboration with CROs or universities, an ELN makes it easier to establish authorship and ownership across organizations.
3. Collaboration Is Slowing Down — or Breaking Down — Without a Biotech ELN
When your lab was small, it was easy to stay in sync. But as your team grows, or as you start working with CROs, academic partners, or remote contributors, the old systems stop working.
Experiments get handed off between scientists, but context gets lost. Results are shared in long email threads, and feedback happens ad hoc — sometimes weeks too late. Multiple people work on the same project, but there’s no consistent way to capture discussion, comments, or approvals in one place.
A biotech ELN acts as a shared workspace for experimental collaboration, where everyone involved in a study — from planning to review — can contribute in context:
- Share protocols, data, and notes in a centralized, secure notebook.
- Facilitate collaborative review of results with comments, attachments, and annotations.
- Hand off experiments seamlessly between scientists or teams, preserving all relevant background.
- Enable digital sign-offs or approvals from senior scientists or QA leads, helping formalize key decisions.
Whether you’re co-located or distributed, ELN software helps your team stay connected — without relying on memory, Slack threads, or disconnected Google Docs.
4. You’re Preparing for Regulatory Submissions
As your biotech moves toward preclinical milestones, regulatory submissions such as an Investigational New Drug (IND) application become a priority. These filings demand more than experimental results — they require a clear, traceable record of how those results were generated.
If your documentation lives in spreadsheets, shared drives, and scattered notes, assembling a submission package becomes time-consuming and error-prone.
An ELN helps you build regulatory-grade documentation as you go, by capturing:
- Time-stamped, version-controlled experiment records
- Protocol history and method development over time
- Electronic sign-offs and witness signatures
- A centralized, searchable log of supporting data
Starting early with an ELN reduces the burden of IND preparation later — and ensures your documentation meets the expectations of reviewers, investors, and internal stakeholders.
5. You’re Onboarding New Scientists More Frequently
Every new hire comes with growing pains. If your onboarding process involves sending people a Dropbox link and hoping they can figure out where the protocols live, that’s a problem.
As your team scales, you can’t afford to lose knowledge when someone leaves — or take weeks to get someone up to speed. An ELN acts as an institutional memory bank: one place for finalized protocols, annotated results, and experiment histories that new scientists can learn from right away.
Biotech ELNs hold all your protocols in the same software operations take place in- helping to reduce onboarding time, cut down training errors, and keep your team productive even as the pace of hiring increases.
So When Do You Adopt a Biotech ELN?
There’s no single “perfect” time to adopt an ELN — but if any of these signs sound familiar, your lab is probably ready. You don’t have to overhaul your systems overnight. Many biotech teams start small — one team, one process — and expand as their needs grow.
Modern ELN software, like the ones built into LabKey’s Biologics LIMS and Sample Manager platforms, are designed with biotech in mind: secure, flexible, and scalable as your research evolves.
