LAS

An oncology research lab, without paper notebooks or grubby keyboards

LAS (Laboratory Assistant Suite) is a laboratory information management system that started in 2011 from a feasibility study for Istituto di Candiolo (IRCCS), the cancer research and treatment center. The goal was to replace scattered lab notebooks and spreadsheets with a single system able to track samples, experiments, and molecular data across their entire lifecycle.

I contributed to designing the system’s modular architecture, built to adapt to very different types of biological and molecular data without having to rewrite the system every time a research protocol changes. Particular care went into the user interface, designed to be usable in a sterile environment — where typing on a keyboard isn’t always practical — minimizing the manual interactions required from researchers while working at the bench.

LAS is used daily at Istituto di Candiolo today, and has also been adopted by other international institutes involved in EU research projects, confirming the soundness of the approach.

The work on LAS is documented in several peer-reviewed scientific publications, including an article in the Journal of Medical Systems (Baralis, Bertotti, Fiori, Grand, 2012), two book chapters published by IGI Global in 2018, and an article in the journal Database (Grand, Geda, Mignone, Bertotti, Fiori, 2019).