Case Study: European Molecular Biology Laboratory achieves faster, more accurate high-throughput compound screening with TIBCO Software's Spotfire

European Molecular Biology Laboratory Uses TIBCO Spotfire to Help Identify and Develop Chemical Compounds In Academic Screening Facility

The Chemical Biology Core Facility at EMBL — a joint service with DKFZ and Heidelberg University — screens a library of roughly 80,000 compounds to identify biotools for novel biological targets. Faced with massive, multivariate high-throughput screening (HTS) data and limited specialist resources, the team needed an easy-to-use analytics tool to detect systematic errors, perform automated quality control, and enable project managers (not just data analysts) to make fast, reliable decisions.

They deployed TIBCO Spotfire, integrated with the facility’s IBDS ActivityBase, to visualize and filter millions of data points, run normalization and Z‑score quality checks, correct systematic errors, and drill from overview to single data points. The result: QC and campaign quality can be assessed minutes after upload, confirmation rates improved, follow-up costs and false positives dropped, and project managers can handle big data interactively without a dedicated analyst — speeding HTS and increasing confidence in selected hits.

European Molecular Biology Laboratory

Jan Selig

Senior Technical Officer