 With mountains of data created daily, The Scripps Research Institute, a world-renowned cancer and biomedical research facility, needed to help scientists and doctors from a variety of disciplines link their work on potential cancer treatments with the latest research. Scripps Research turned to InterKnowlogy, to design a custom solution. Using the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, Windows Vista™, and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, we created an application that allows researchers to examine 3-D models of cancer cell proteins, annotate the models with relevant data, and then share notes with colleagues. Researchers now spend less time searching for data and more time developing potential treatment solutions.
 The IK team came up with a solution for Dr. Kuhn’s lab called the Collaborative Molecular Environment (C-ME), which provides a tool that researchers can use for data capture, visualization, annotation, and archiving. The C-ME takes stored information about cell and protein molecules, builds 2-D and 3-D models of these molecules, and makes the models available to Scripps Research staff and their collaborators around the world on a dedicated server using Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007.
Scripps Research had significant tools to analyze samples and display them as 3-D images, InterKnowlogy CEO Tim Huckaby explains. “What they didn’t have was a way to annotate those images or a specific part of the image. They could only look at an image, maybe discuss with their colleagues in the same room, but to confer with anyone else, they had to go offline or take notes on a piece of paper.”
That was the problem the C-ME design intended to solve. “We built a viewer on the .NET Framework 3.0 with Windows Presentation Foundation, and the viewer allows cancer researchers to look at these 2-D or 3-D images. Then, with just a right-click, they can attach their notes, create Word documents, attach other research or another picture, or point to a URL that is any specific point on the rendering,” Huckaby says.
Development on the project started in March 2006 and Dr Peter Kuhn was evaluating an early version of the tool about two weeks later. “This was important because it allowed us to have a very dynamic development process,” Kuhn says. “Every two weeks, they would bring us a new version that was just an order of magnitude better than the previous one. It was just unbelievable.”
The proof of concept prototype took only six weeks to build. Before the .NET Framework, it would have taken twenty developers two years to build this application.
Because Office SharePoint Server 2007 creates a central repository for data in almost any format, researchers are not limited in the ways they organize their data. Being able to link multiple kinds of data to an image of a single molecule, for example, makes it easier to organize experiments, collect and  distribute results, and speed up the process of uncovering deeper knowledge from various experiments. “Because it’s SharePoint, every entity, every blood sample or lab report, can become its own site,” says Huckaby. “All the information about that entity can be collected and retrieved—from one point.”
The volume of data created at Scripps Research is immense. “They have terabytes of data spread over numerous networks. There was no way they could find all that data, let alone link one piece of research to another. Because everything’s now housed in the [Office] SharePoint 2007 site, Peter and his team can search all their data. It’s all together, all linked. That makes their job dramatically easier,” Huckaby says.
In addition, because the CME is built on Windows Vista, it’s easy and safe to allow access to researchers around the world. “We run the application on a secure server, and we control the access we give to people under Active Directory® directory service,” says Kuhn.
In the near future, Scripps Research will link the CME to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.“We need to build complex workflow scenarios among the peers, researchers, pathologists, doctors, and patients around the world. The integration between Microsoft Office and Exchange Server 2007 is fantastic and it will be dramatically easier to create those workflow tools with Exchange Server 2007 in the solution.”
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http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/0/b/b0be56b4-0cd7-4274-9a9f-641c8b8fbc9e/cs1_ScrippsResearch_PeopleReady.pdf
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