The smarter ELN for modern research

Trust is the currency of science.

Whether you’re publishing results, submitting regulatory data, or developing new therapeutics, the confidence others have in your data determines how far it can go. And that confidence—research integrity—doesn’t just come from good intentions. It comes from robust systems.

Too often, we treat integrity as a people issue. We focus on protocols, training, or maybe ethics. All important. But after decades working with labs of every size and discipline, I’ve seen something else at play: when your systems are fragmented, your integrity is at risk—even when your people do everything right.

In many labs, data still lives across a messy patchwork of systems—an ELN here, a spreadsheet there, paper records in a binder. Teams copy and paste data across platforms, version control becomes guesswork, and no one’s quite sure what the “final” version is.

When an auditor asks for proof of compliance or a collaborator needs to validate results, you realize how much depends on assumed knowledge and goodwill. And when people move on, or mistakes surface, the fragility of those systems becomes painfully clear.

That’s why I believe system integrity is the backbone of research integrity—and why connected lab platforms are no longer a nice-to-have, but a scientific necessity.

When systems undermine science

Research integrity doesn’t fail all at once. It erodes quietly, through disconnected point solutions, manual data transfer and systems that were never designed to work together.

I’ve walked into labs with world-class researchers using cutting-edge instrumentation—only to find their data pipelines held together with nothing more than good intentions. It’s not because they don’t care. It’s because the systems around them haven’t kept pace with the demands of modern science.

Disconnected platforms; siloed ELNs, standalone LIMS, inventory tools that don’t talk to safety systems—all create invisible fault lines. Data gets duplicated or lost. Metadata goes missing. It becomes impossible to trace the full lifecycle of a sample or reconstruct the context behind a result.

And when that happens, the consequences are real. Reproducibility suffers. Internal reviews stall. Regulatory submissions take longer and carry more risk. Worse still, you lose confidence—not just in your systems, but in the science itself.

For organizations working in regulated environments, the stakes are even higher. Incomplete audit trails, missing version histories, or informal approvals can mean non-compliance, rejected submissions, or reputational damage.

These aren’t edge cases. They’re everyday realities in labs that haven’t yet joined up their data infrastructure. And they represent a quiet threat to the very thing science depends on most: trust.

What research integrity actually looks like

Too often, research integrity gets framed as either a matter of ethics or a matter of compliance—something enforced through training or checked off in audits. But in real-world lab environments, it comes down to something more fundamental: can your infrastructure support consistent, trustworthy science?

That infrastructure isn’t just software. It’s the entire operational system that governs how data is generated, recorded, shared, and reviewed. It includes your ELN, LIMS, EHS system, instrument integrations, user permissions, approval chains, and how all of those components interact.

In labs with strong system integrity, research integrity is built-in. You don’t have to rely on memory, trust, or double-checking a spreadsheet—because the process itself ensures traceability, reproducibility and control at every step.

Here’s what it looks like in practice:

• Protocols are version-controlled and digitally signed by authorized users

• Sample records are automatically linked to test results, instruments, and reagents used

• Every action is timestamped and traceable across users and systems

• Permissions and role-based access prevent accidental edits or data leaks

• Metadata—like experiment conditions or instrument settings—is captured automatically, not added after the fact

It’s about more than preventing fraud. It’s about preventing drift—those subtle gaps between what was planned, what was done, and what gets reported. When those gaps widen, reproducibility breaks down. When they close, trust scales.

And this matters whether you’re running a small academic group or a global R&D program. Because sooner or later, someone outside your team—an auditor, a collaborator, a regulator—will ask: can we rely on this data?

Research integrity means being able to say “yes”, and being able to show it, systemically. That’s exactly what we’re building at SciSure: a connected home base for the lab where trust, traceability, and transparency aren’t bolted on—they’re built in.

The value of system integrity

Research integrity is often treated as an outcome—as something measured by reproducibility, accuracy or audit success. But behind all those metrics is a more foundational truth: you can’t deliver research integrity unless your systems are built to support it.

This is where system integrity comes in. It’s not about individual tools. It’s about how your tools work together to preserve the full lifecycle of your data: generation, approval, storage, access and re-use.

Labs with strong system integrity can trace every data point back to its origin—who captured it, how it was reviewed, and where it’s stored. Their workflows don’t rely on individuals to go the extra mile; they’re embedded in the platform. And when regulations evolve or new technologies are introduced, those systems adapt, because they were designed with change in mind.

System integrity isn’t an add-on—it’s the architecture. And in our experience, when you get that right, research integrity stops being a problem you fix—and starts being something you can trust.

Turning risky into resilient

Disconnected systems don’t just slow things down—they erode confidence. When your ELN, LIMS, EHS system and instrument data all live in separate silos, the gaps between them become places where integrity fails: a missing sample ID, an overwritten protocol, a spreadsheet with no owner.

That’s why connected platforms are so essential—not just for operational efficiency, but for resilience. When systems are joined up, workflows become transparent. Data becomes trustworthy. Compliance becomes routine, not reactive.

At SciSure, we’ve built our Scientific Management Platform (SMP) around that principle. It brings together the critical building blocks of research management—ELN, LIMS, EHS, inventory, sample tracking, regulatory workflows and audit logs—into one coherent, cloud-native environment.

Within the SMP, system integrity is more than a principle—it’s a set of connected capabilities designed to make compliance and reproducibility seamless. That includes:

• Automated sample lineage tracking across collection, processing, and storage

• Embedded compliance checkpoints aligned with 21 CFR Part 11, GxP, and ISO 17025

• Configurable approval chains with full digital audit trails

• A unified environment where ELN, LIMS, and EHS modules speak the same language

• Scalable SDK-based integration, allowing labs to evolve without losing traceability

But just as importantly, the SMP isn’t rigid. Every lab works differently. That’s why we offer both a growing library of ready-to-use integrations and a developer Software Development Toolkit that supports custom workflows, instrument integrations and data pipelines. You’re not stuck working around the platform—you shape it around how your lab already works.

And when your systems are this connected, integrity becomes effortless. You’re no longer relying on tribal knowledge to chase down files or verify data lineage. It’s all there—verifiable, reproducible and ready to stand up to scrutiny.

Research resilience starts here. Not with good intentions or paper-based processes, but with infrastructure that’s designed to make trust scalable.

Research integrity is in your hands

Research integrity isn’t just about what happens at the bench—it’s about what happens behind the scenes. The tools, the workflows, the handoffs, the audit trails. If those systems are fragile, no amount of rigor at the surface can compensate for what’s missing underneath.

That’s why integrity has to start at the system level. When your infrastructure supports consistency, traceability and compliance by default, research integrity becomes scalable. Defensible. Repeatable. It becomes a property of your lab—not just the people in it.

At SciSure, we believe that good science needs good systems. And we’ve built our platform to help labs create the kind of environment where integrity thrives—now and in the future.

If you’re serious about protecting the trustworthiness of your research, start by asking: do your systems support the science you stand behind?

Ready to future-proof your lab’s integrity? Contact us to see how SciSure can help you unlock the system your science deserves.

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Lab operations is a job of countless moving parts. You’re the one who gets the 6 a.m. message about a broken freezer. The one answering late emails about missing reagents. The one tracking down overdue chemical inventory reports. It’s you that’s stuck in the middle—trying to keep scientists on-track, keep EHS happy, and still hit the goals set from administration.

And here’s the truth: your job isn’t one job. It’s twenty. You’re part scientist, part problem solver, part safety officer, equipment coordinator, procurement specialist, compliance tracker—and yes, firefighter. Every day. All the time.

I’ve talked with enough LabOps leaders to know that “multitasking” doesn’t even begin to cover it. One of the first questions I ask when I meet someone in LabOps is: How many hats do you wear? And without fail, they just laugh—or roll their eyes. Because they already know the answer: Too many.

One person recently told me, “If I could just take off one hat—just one—I’d be so much more valuable to my scientists.” That stuck with me. Because it speaks to a deeper truth about your role: you’re the operational engine behind the lab, the one keeping the science moving, the one making sure research doesn’t stall. And yet? You’re often unable to get to the work that moves the needle. 

You’re expected to be the glue—to bind together scientists, EHS, vendors, facilities, IT, and more—but no one’s provided you the tools to actually hold it all together. That’s not your fault. That’s the system’s fault.

We’ve normalized the dysfunction

Most labs I walk into are juggling an eye-watering number of systems: There’s an app for inspections. A training matrix spreadsheet. A cloud drive for ordering. A digital binder for SDS sheets that hasn’t been updated in months. Someone’s still logging chemicals in an Excel sheet. And yet—everyone’s expected to operate like a high-performance team.

Scientists are in their own zone, focused on getting experiments done. EHS is off in theirs, trying to ensure safety and regulatory coverage without full visibility into the data they need to be audit ready. LabOps are often the one caught in the middle, expected to make all of it work. We’ve been sold the idea that this fragmented ecosystem is normal. That cobbling together ten tools and calling it “digital transformation” is just the cost of doing science.

But it’s not normal. It’s just the status quo—and it’s broken.

We don’t need more complexity. We need operational simplicity.

In biopharma, there’s a buzzword that’s been floating around for years: “operational excellence”. You see it in slide decks. Hear it in strategy meetings. Entire departments are built around chasing it.

But I’ll be honest—when I see the typical roadmap for getting there, my eyes glaze over. Not because it isn’t well-intentioned. But because it’s built for a world where you’ve got unlimited time, a dozen project managers, and years to transform your systems. 

That’s not the world LabOps lives in. Most labs don’t need “excellence”, they need something that works today. That’s why, at SciSure, we’re championing something new: operational simplicity. And we’ve created the first platform that actually delivers it—end to end. We’re not here to add another tool to the pile. We’re here to replace the pile with something built from the ground up for the people who actually use it.

The Scientific Management Platform (SMP) is a first-of-its-kind system that unites scientists, LabOps, and EHS under one roof. Not as users of the same tool, but as collaborators inside a shared ecosystem. Forged from a strategic merger between two trusted leaders—eLabNext, known for its ELN and LIMS software, and SciShield, respected for EHS, biosafety, and chemical safety solutions—we’re working hard to deliver something no one else had the conviction to do:

A true end-to-end solution. A home base for the entire scientific organization.

• One login. One interface. One system that links research, inventory, safety, compliance, and regulatory reporting.
• Intuitive dashboards for scientists, EHS, and LabOps—tailored to what they need.
• Built-in safety and compliance workflows—no chasing, no bolt-ons, no “oops, we forgot to do the training”.
• A modular design that lets you adopt what you need today—and expand when you're ready.

With the SMP, you're not logging in and out of 10 tools. You're not re-entering data or transcribing between systems that can’t talk to each other. You’re not cobbling together workarounds just to make your lab function. You're simply working. Confidently. Transparently. Collaboratively.

And that’s the power of operational simplicity: it gives you control. Control over your workflows. Control over your data. Control over your time. In a world that’s constantly changing—funding shifts, regulatory updates, staffing turnover—you can’t control the chaos. But you can control the controllables. That’s what SciSure is here to help you do.

Our goal at SciSure isn’t to force everyone into the same workflow. It’s to connect their silos in a way that makes sense—so that LabOps doesn’t have to be the translator, or the buffer, or the one who copies data from one system to another.

Scientists want to work in their environment. EHS needs reliable data. LabOps needs visibility across both. We’re building SciSure to make that possible—to let everyone do their job well, while ensuring they’re connected in the background where it counts.

From chasing problems to preventing them

I’ve heard it time and time again: LabOps lives in reactive mode. You’re running from one task to the next, never quite catching up, always reacting. There’s no space to think ahead—let alone optimize, strategize, or innovate. But when you give LabOps the right tools, everything changes.

Suddenly, you’ve got real-time dashboards that tell you what’s overdue, what’s at risk, and what’s just around the corner. You get automatic reminders for training, inspections, and compliance updates—not frantic emails the day before something’s due. Instead of cross-checking three systems to figure out who’s behind on chemical inventory, you can see the status in a single view. You stop wondering if your data is current. You know it is.

Reporting becomes fast and confident. MAQs, CFATS, flammables—the kind of documentation that used to take hours now takes minutes, because it’s all built in. No more guesswork. No more copy-paste. And with threshold-based alerts tied to real hazard data, you're not just catching problems. You're preventing them.

But here’s the part I love the most—it changes how you think. Instead of dreading the next audit, you’re ready for it. Instead of catching issues downstream, you’re preventing them upstream. Instead of getting pulled in every direction, you’re setting the direction. That’s the shift we’re creating with SciSure. And it’s not hypothetical—it’s happening right now in labs just like yours.

Time to rethink chemical inventory

Ask anyone in LabOps what drains the most time, and chemical inventory will be near the top. Not because it’s difficult—but because it’s disconnected. Updates get lost. SDSs live in silos. Reports are always a scramble. We’ve built SciSure to turn that burden into a strategic lever.

With SciSure, chemical inventory tasks that used to take hours now take minutes. As soon as a chemical is added to inventory, you know which hazards apply and what regulations are relevant, even going as far as automatically adding it to your regulatory reports. One team we worked with used to spend nearly three full days reconciling chemical inventory across their site. After switching to SciSure, they were done in thirty minutes. Another cut data correction time from seventeen hours per month down to under two minutes. When you scale these time savings across dozens of people, across hundreds of tasks, those minutes and costs add up fast.

We recently looked at data from 32 customer sites to understand the real impact of transforming chemical inventory workflows. Here’s a snapshot of what LabOps and EHS teams are actually gaining back:

Table 1: Time savings reported across 32 SciSure customer sites

But the real value isn’t just speed. It’s confidence. When inventory connects to hazard profiles, to training requirements, to reporting and procurement—you’re not just checking boxes. You’re running a safer, more accountable lab. And you’re giving scientists and EHS teams shared data they can trust.

Flexibility and extendibility built around you. 

SciSure doesn’t pretend to be everything for everyone. We know labs are complex. We know preferences vary. That’s why we built our SciSure Marketplace of integrations to be open and extensible.

Let’s say you already have a scheduling tool your scientists love. Great. Don’t toss it—integrate it. Or maybe your team uses a specific vendor for procurement or equipment monitoring. Perfect—bring them in.

Our Marketplace is designed to let you work the way you want. It’s an open ecosystem where trusted third parties—including some of our own competitors—can plug directly into the SciSure platform. Why? Because we believe that as a scientific community, we are “better together”. Because if it makes your workflow smoother, if it saves your team time, and if it helps scientists get back to the work that matters, then we’ll make room. That’s how serious we are about interoperability.

As one of our Marketplace Partners put it:

“Our integration with SciSure allows scientists, LabOps, and EHS to view critical data in one seamless place. It means labs can proactively monitor environmental conditions and respond instantly to deviations that could compromise valuable samples.”
- Sridhar Iyengar, Founder and CSTO, Elemental Machines

Some of our customers have even started building their own integrations. One group created a fully custom equipment scheduler inside SciSure using our developer tools. No vendor lock-in. No workarounds. Just functionality that fits the way they operate.

That’s what flexibility should look like. Because you’re not here to serve the system. The system should serve you.

Let’s stop fixing what’s broken. Let’s build what works.

The truth is, LabOps shouldn’t have to hustle this hard just to hold the lab together. Scientists shouldn’t be buried in admin. EHS shouldn’t have to chase compliance.

And you? You shouldn’t be the translator between teams and tools that were never built to align in the first place.

That’s why we created SciSure. Not as a patch, but as a true home base. A unified foundation for modern labs—one that connects your people, your processes, and your purpose. Because the science matters. And so do the people and patients behind it.

Let’s make it easier to do the work that matters most. Let’s give LabOps their time, their tools, and their voice back. You’re not the problem. The system is.

Let’s fix it--together.

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Cambridge, MA — July 10, 2025 — SciSure, formerly SciShield and eLabNext, is proud to announce the formal sponsorship of The Engine, a nonprofit founded by MIT to  incubate and accelerate early-stage Tough Tech companies from idea to impact. This sponsorship marks the next step in a partnership rooted in a shared mission: helping startups accelerate the development of life-changing technologies, treatments, and healthcare solutions.

SciSure was recently formed from the merger of SciShield and eLabNext. Both companies were longtime partners of The Engine: For years, SciShield supported The Engine with environmental health and safety (EHS) and compliance infrastructure, while eLabNext powered the digital backbone of many resident companies. Now, by joining forces, SciShield and eLabNext are expanding their support—giving Tough Tech entrepreneurs connected access to the critical digital tools, compliance frameworks, and operational resources they need to scale and succeed.

"We’ve seen firsthand how important the right infrastructure is for Tough Tech startups to reach the market," said Jon Zibell, VP of Global Alliances and Marketing for SciSure "By deepening our partnership with The Engine, we’re making it easier for innovators to focus on what matters most—delivering breakthroughs that have a lasting impact on society."

“Given the fact that science is moving more and more towards Tough Tech and Tech Bio (as in technology-first, using advanced computational tools like AI, ML, cloud, and data engineering), it is so important to be able to create an API/SDK-Powered ecosystem for scientists that know that we can support their platforms, automation, and scalability.” said Zareh Zurabyan, VP of Commercial, Americas for SciSure. 

Through this enhanced partnership, The Engine’s resident companies will gain:

• Integrated Digital Operations: Access to eLabNext’s Digital Lab Platform (DLP), combining ELN, LIMS, lab automation, and compliance tracking into one connected system.
• Built-in EHS and Compliance Support: SciShield’s platform ensures startups meet regulatory standards from day one, reducing risk and saving time.
• Early Access Incentives: Special access to tailored onboarding, incentives, and ongoing support for adopting SciShield and eLabNext solutions. 
• Best-in-Class Software: A full suite of software solutions for Scientists, LabOps, and EHS to ensure the highest probability of achieving commercial success and making a lasting impact.
• Education and Collaboration: New opportunities for startups to participate in co-hosted workshops, hands-on training, and knowledge-sharing sessions on lab digitalization, safety, and compliance.

“For years, SciSchield and eLabNext have provided critical infrastructure and resources to fuel the growth of our residents,” said Alexa Monti, Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships at The Engine. “We are now thrilled to welcome their sponsorship as SciSure. Partnerships like this are essential to building a resilient innovation ecosystem that enables founders to transform breakthrough ideas into world-changing impact.”

About The Engine:

The Engine is a nonprofit incubator and accelerator dedicated to supporting early-stage Tough Tech companies tackling the world's greatest challenges. Founded by MIT in 2016, The Engine provides critical support for Tough Tech companies in the form of specialized lab and fabrication infrastructure, programming and mentorship, and an ecosystem of experts and investors. By bridging the gap between groundbreaking ideas and real-world impact, The Engine plays a crucial role in advancing solutions to complex global issues. For more information, visit engine.xyz

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Media Contact: 

press@engine.xyz

Media Contact:

Jon Zibell
Vice President of Global Alliances & Marketing
‍J.Zibell@scisure.com

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