Frequently Asked Questions

Quick answers and guidance for common questions

How should I define programs and when should I add new ones?

Programs represent the highest-level unit of work in Study Tracker and are used for grouping child studies and assays. How you choose to define programs is really up to your organization and its needs. While the name 'program' implies a drug discovery program, you can think of programs in Study Tracker as abstract projects that may or may-not have an expected end date. A few examples we have seen:

• Target Identification

• Disease areas (eg. cancer or liver disease)

• General platform or functional groups (eg. lab operations or platform development)

• Drug discovery, preclinical, and clinical programs

There is no need to plan or expect all related studies over the lifetime of an organization to fall under a single program. In the above example, it is likely that what eventually becomes a clinical-stage project might start in Platform Development or Target ID before graduating to another preclinical project. Study relationships and collections can be used to maintain links between studies grouped into different programs.

With this in mind, you should think about adding new programs whenever you feel like a project has outgrown the existing ones, or whenever it feels like you are bundling too many unrelated studies into the same program.

How should I define studies and when should I add new ones?

Study records in Study Tracker are vaguely defined on purpose, allowing you to define a study in a number of different ways. A study can be a short-term sequencing experiment completed in a day-or-two, or it can be a long-running animal study that has many steps and may take multiple months. The one guiding principal for defining studies should be that they have a defined plan and definite end date. The study proposal, protocol, and results should be captured in your organization's electronic laboratory notebook, but a summary should be provided in the study description in Study Tracker. If additional work needs to be done for a study that has already been completed, it is probably better to create a new study and link it to the existing one, rather than add additional assays to a study that has already been marked complete (though Study Tracker will not prevent you from doing this).