Custom Laboratory Software Solutions

Case studies

Challenge

Our client is a global life science company that delivers data acquisition and analytical solutions, enabling its customers to gain critical insights from data analytics and make informed decisions. They approached us to help them collaborate with their client and augment the internal development team for a life science project in Mass Spectrometry. They needed to meet their customer’s expectations in terms of remote centralized access to the instruments and data, and would miss out on a growth opportunity in its market segment if the migration of its desktop solution to a cloud-ready platform was delayed or hindered.

Solution

Our development team included leading professionals in system architecture, software engineering, performance optimization, and QA engineers with spectrometry expertise. Quantori assessed the on-premise monolith Windows desktop platform used for communication with the instrument, data collection, and processing. The team started migrating the platform to the service-oriented architecture, decoupling the monolith solution and implementing multiple services, such as (Data Storage, Service Authorization, Authentication, and AuditLogging). The team also suggested and implemented a solution to satisfy the client's requirement of reusing a legacy application that was created for data processing (Visual Studio 6, 32-bit Compiler, and C++). These services communicate with each other using the gRPC framework and NATS messaging system. NOMAD was chosen for services orchestration, Keycloak, for authentication and as an identity provider, and PostgreSQL and Min.IO, for data storage. As for a proxy service to use on the product, the team assessed NGINX and Caddy and chose to use Caddy. The team optimized the performance and memory usage of the existing code, and performed refactoring and redesign of the product to support the migration to the service-oriented architecture and distributed design.

Outcome

The Quantori team developed and validated algorithms, and accelerated data analysis and visualization of the MassSpec application. In addition, we created a web/tablet application to perform acquisition on the connected instrument, that allowed for the connection and management of multiple instruments from one space. We facilitated the collaboration between remote teams enabling them to easily access data from a centralized data storage hub. And finally, we enabled a gradual migration of their existing desktop platform to a technology-agnostic hybrid Cloud platform.