A quality provider of Laboratory Information Management Solutions to forensic laboratories since 1995; JusticeTrax serves some of the most sophisticated Law Enforcement Agencies and Crime Laboratories in North America, Australia, and the Middle East. In this fascinating interview, JusticeTrax Product Manager Melissa Bennett and Customer Care Manager Jenna Oakes-Smith reveal a fascinating perspective on the meeting points between biotechnology, forensics, and law enforcement in the 2020s.
Please describe your background and the company’s background.
Melissa: JusticeTrax creates software to support forensic labs, police departments, medical examiner’s offices, etc. Over 25 years, we have developed a suite of products that work together to support the entire lab environment. Among them, we have a targeted product for forensic DNA analysis; that part of the lab that allows lab teams to track their samples, upload their results at different stages of the process, and interpret any profiles obtained. We also offer the ability to create and upload files to the national DNA database.
Jenna and I are both managers at the company. I’m the Product Manager and Jenna is the Customer Care Manager, but both of us have a background in forensic biology.
I spent six years in the biology section of a forensic lab in Canada before I joined JusticeTrax 14 years ago. I’ve served in multiple roles during my tenure here. My current role is as Product Manager, though in this role, I also do a lot of feature design. LIMS-plus DNA was one of the first whole products that I took from ideation to implementation.
Jenna: I too was a forensic biologist. I did traditional serology screening, taking up samples and forensically analyzing the DNA for use in court and legal proceedings. I worked for a crime lab for 10 years before I joined JusticeTrax, four years ago. I first started as an Implementation Specialist, helping analysts to use the product when it was still in its infancy, and receiving a lot of feedback from customers. That’s how I became a subject matter expert to help Melissa with designing and adding functionality to help the product evolve.
In simple terms, how does your product, LIMS-plus DNA work?
Melissa: LIMS-plus DNA is designed for labs that perform forensic biology functions. We have a number of products that support other areas of the lab, but we’ll focus specifically on the DNA application here. It allows users to electronically send the data associated with their samples that might originate in our other products or from any other Evidence Management product, and organize them into batches and plates to perform the process steps while keeping track of the chain of custody.
The chain of custody includes information about where the samples all get transferred from, where they are stored, and how they flow through the entire process, from being extracted to the detection step and beyond. The application also captures the output of allele calls, and allows for the interpretation of profiles from those allele calls at the end of the process.
Not only do we track the Chain of Custody, we also track the reagents that the samples are processed with, all of the controls and standards used, and all the instruments on which the processing occurs. As I mentioned previously, we can accept files for upload from these instruments to capture the results without the user having to manually enter them into the product.
Jenna: The focus is really on documenting the analysis. We don’t release Final Analytical Reports from within LIMS-plus DNA (those are within the workflow of LIMS-plus), but we are able to generate all manner of worksheets representing the work done within LIMS-plus DNA. It’s a very robust application to help track everything about the lab work involved in processing DNA samples.
What are the main challenges that criminalists are struggling with these days, and how does your product help?
Jenna: One thing that has always been a struggle in DNA labs that we can help with, is being able to track what was used to analyze a particular sample. Whether that be a reagent, a kit, an instrument or a lot of tubes, because the data are entered and stored, we can retrieve them.
It is not uncommon for an analyst or a lab to recognize or receive information about contaminants that may have been present in a particular lot number of tubes, or a lot number that was actually collected using a commercial kit that did not meet the lab’s quality standards.
The community is very good at recognizing and disseminating that information. When someone finds out that they have problems with a particular lot number, they want to know, by official or unofficial channels, where and how those problems started. The difficulty is you may know that it was in your organization, but trying to determine which physical samples need to be reevaluated or reprocessed is definitely a challenge when your only records are on paper, or in spreadsheets. By leveraging the data in the database using queries or reporting, you can identify the specific samples processed with the Lot Number of “contaminated” reagent or consumable.
The Chain of Custody also helps to meet the needs of new accreditation guidelines that state that any sample that may need to be reworked needs to have traceability associated with it.
When being analyzed in a Forensic Lab, DNA samples typically go through a 4 step process: Extraction, Quantitation, Amplification, and Detection.
When a sample starts in Extraction, it may be something like a cutting from clothing that has blood on it. During the extraction process, the actual piece of fabric, for instance, is processed with chemicals to remove the cellular material from it. This is what we refer to as “work product.” It is this cellular material that moves onto the other stages of the process. Some labs will choose to track this cellular material as a sub-sample of the original sample – literally showing that what continued through the Quantitation, Amplification and Detection processes was NOT the fabric, but the cellular material. The original piece of fabric, which was the vector for the cells, may be discarded or maintained in a storage location (again, depending on the lab’s policies). Thus, both the original piece of fabric (parent item) and the cellular material (child item) will have separate chains of custody from their point of separation. The chain of custody is that traceability record.
The tracking of samples and batches allows organizations to know what their workflow is, and how quickly or efficiently they are processing samples. It allows them to do the data mining that is necessary in order to justify and support grant work and alternate funding sources, as well as find out what their employees are actually able to accomplish in a given timeframe. Those management data points that may be missing if you’re not using a system like LIMS-plus DNA, can really be leveraged with our product.
There is a Management Dashboard function within the application that allows permitted users to see the number of Batches or Samples awaiting each step of the process. It’s a quick way for Operations to determine how to deploy resources, or where bottlenecks might be occurring due to not enough reagents, instruments in circulation, or other factors.
How has COVID-19 affected your business and industry?
Melissa: Our company typically has its headquarters in Mesa, Arizona and the majority of employees work from the office every day. Over a weekend in March, we suddenly had to stop going into the office and start working from home. Thankfully, the work we did to prepare for and maintain ISO 27001 accreditation includes not only meeting requirements for information security management and control, but also specific requirements for recovery in the event of a disaster, including loss of the physical office. We were able to leverage the physical preparation for such a disaster into a work from home situation. Obviously, there are more factors that come into play with remote work than just the physical location, and we’ve endeavored to figure out ways of making that transition better.
As with anyone moving from an office environment to working from home, there are challenges in defining your new workspace and really learning to work without having somebody to refer to next to you or down the hall. But I think as time goes by, a lot of people are starting to enjoy the no-commute working from home and we’re realizing that we may even be more productive in some ways. Given the situation in the US, and specifically Arizona, we’re not in a rush to get back to the office.
In terms of the business, we likely will not see a financial impact until maybe six months to a year from now. Our customers pay an annual maintenance fee for access to software support and upgrades, and as they are typically government entities, their sources of funding may be redirected elsewhere in the upcoming fiscal year(s). So we may be seeing customers having difficulty in paying their maintenance in the future or asking to downgrade the number of “extra” licenses they have on hand, but that doesn’t impact us immediately. We’re trying to curb unnecessary spending to assist us down the road, if and when this becomes our reality.
Jenna: One thing that we have noticed immediately through client feedback is that many people were sent home. In a lab, especially in a crime lab environment, trying to find something for someone to work on from home when they’re used to working in the lab became a little bit more difficult. We received feedback that organizations that were using our products and had access to their electronic records were more easily able to perform their work, even from home, whether it was data review or data entry.
In contrast, groups that were still very much on paper, or were in a situation where the application was not browser-based, had significantly more difficulty. Trying to find something for an individual to do outside of the lab, but still maintain them as a productive member of the team, became a lot easier for organizations that used LIMS-plus DNA.
Melissa: We also saw a lot of activity on JT Academy, our video training platform for lab teams. While people are at home and can’t actually do any physical lab work, we definitely see an uptick in the utilization of the training platform.
Which trends or technologies do you find to be particularly intriguing these days around your field of work?
Jenna: From a customer perspective things that we will probably need to look at and investigate putting into our products in the future.
One thing that is starting to come up more and more is forensic genealogy: utilizing the ancestry approach with forensic samples in order to identify investigative leads. We’re seeing more police and investigative units utilizing that as a resource to gain investigative leads. Storing information or documentation related to that could potentially start coming up more and more.
From a technological standpoint, with the development of rapid DNA technology, I think what we’re going to start seeing more of is single units that can get a profile in a matter of hours by using a streamlined process for specific things like reference samples or CODIS entry and searches.
This is a specific technology that puts all of the stages of the typical DNA process onto a chip that is run through a single instrument to obtain a profile. The limitation to this technology is that the best samples for processing in this way are single-source – what you’d typically get as a Reference sample, to which you can compare a blood sample or a cheek swab of someone directly involved in the case, for the purposes of exclusion. This technology can be used to provide investigative leads, or for comparison to “CODIS” (the US National DNA Databank)
The chemistry and the documentation of the analysis could potentially be very different than what we have now. More and more commercial companies are moving from the actual STR (Short Tandem Repeats) analysis, or longer chains of repeating patterns of nucleotides, to a more granular SNP analysis- a type of DNA analysis that looks for single nucleotide differences or Single Nucleotide “Polymorphisms”, which requires sequencing specific areas on the DNA.
The difference is in the recording of results, and the number of areas on the DNA that are tested, as well as the statistics that are used to quantify the frequency with which we can expect to find a profile within a population.
Those are the things that our customers are going to start experiencing more, that we want to look at from an application design standpoint.
Melissa: We continue to keep an eye on upcoming technologies and trends and capture the data that labs are generating into a database format that allows easier data mining and reporting.
