SAS boosts the analytics behind life-saving drug development

Updated SAS Life Science Analytics Framework and SAS Real World Evidence help improve the development and safety of new pharmaceuticals with artificial intelligence

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Nov 07, 2018, 08:55 ET

CARY, N.C., Nov. 7, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- To conduct clinical trials and develop new therapeutics, health organizations must manage and analyze staggering amounts of data. For decades, SAS^® has been the gold standard for the life sciences industry. This week, SAS' next-generation solutions for clinical trial data analysis and real world evidence debuted at PhUSE EU Connect in Frankfurt, Germany.

The SAS Life Science Analytics Framework and SAS Real World Evidence deliver analytics, visualization, and modern AI and machine learning capabilities to organizations working with a growing variety of health-related data. New functionality improves their ability to evaluate new drug compounds, explore patient and efficacy data, and bring new therapies to market more quickly and safely than ever.

SAS offered live demos of both solutions during this week's PhUSE EU Connect conference. US audiences can experience the demos at PhUSE US Connect in Baltimore, Feb. 24-27, 2019.

A singular analytics foundation for clinical research
From small biotech entities just getting started in clinical development to large pharmaceutical enterprises with thousands of users, organizations have long relied on the SAS Life Science Analytics Framework. The cloud-based solution enables clinical researchers to manage and analyze trial information in a collaborative platform as well as deliver trial results to regulatory authorities. New functionality will allow them to do so even more efficiently:

The customizable clinical repository hierarchy enables secure information access and collaboration between different organizational functions.
A new SAS program development environment speeds up robust statistical result generation, reducing time to market of new therapies.
The model-driven foundation for CDISC standards governance and enhanced study metadata management drive efficiency from study setup to submission

Santen, a leading ophthalmology specialty company, uses the SAS Life Science Analytics Framework to speed development of new ocular therapies. The solution provides a singular, centralized and auditable clinical data repository for a multidisciplinary research team located in more than half a dozen countries in Asia, Europe and North America.

"As a global organization, it is critical we have consistent, seamless access and version control across all the various groups at Santen, and the SAS Life Science Analytics Framework delivers just that," said Nina Worden, Director of Statistical Programming at Santen. "The advances built into the new end-to-end clinical analytics framework will translate into less time wrangling with operational data management and more time developing innovative treatments that help preserve vision and health of people around the world."

Going beyond clinical trial data
Regulators like the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) have underscored the importance of real world data – or observational data collected beyond controlled clinical trials – to assess the safety and efficacy of new drugs and medical devices. This data comes from electronic health records, claims and billing, disease registries, and even wearables and social media.

Real world data holds tremendous potential to help the industry better design and conduct clinical trials, assess health care use across populations and identify at risk patients. SAS Real World Evidence gives organizations a means to tap this potential, aligning the most advanced analytic technologies to collect and derive intelligence from such data. The latest features and capabilities include:

Data optimization for querying reduces the time to build a cohort and speeds time to insight.
The ability to share cohorts, projects and data fosters greater collaboration between users who have SAS programming skills and those who prefer not to program.
Users can use validated algorithms for analysis or incorporate their own macro libraries to increase access to data, analyses and insights across the organization.

"SAS is ahead of the curve in addressing the ongoing convergence of health care and the life sciences," said Ari Yacobi, Chief Data Scientist at Knowledgent, a health data analytics consulting firm. "Payers, providers, pharmaceutical sponsors and governments want easy access to leading machine learning algorithms informed by industry-standard clinical diagnosis and episode-of-care definitions. SAS Real World Evidence is the best tool we've seen on the market to address where the industry is headed."

Robust analytics transforming health and life sciences
"SAS is the only vendor with this breadth of experience and offering comprehensive solutions for both clinical development and real-world, observational data analysis, inclusive of data management, traceability and regulatory needs," said Mark Lambrecht, Director of the Global Health and Life Science Practice at SAS. "With these updated solutions, we've built upon our industry expertise to provide even more extensive capabilities to manage, analyze and visualize diverse types of patient data across the full drug development spectrum."

SAS will host a two-part webinar exploring how the latest advances in analytic technology, including artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Medical Things, is transforming the health and life science industries. Register today:

The Future of Advanced Analytics in Clinical Research (Nov. 8 at 10 a.m. ET) – Learn how data and analytics are shaping the different stages of clinical research, ultimately helping life sciences companies bring life-changing therapies to market faster while improving safety and reducing costs.
Real-World Evidence and the Convergence of Life Sciences and Health Care (Nov. 15 at 10 a.m. ET) – Discover how AI and advanced analytics power pragmatic trials that yield better therapies, get life-changing therapies to patients faster, and use real world data to deliver better, more personalized treatment plans.

About SAS
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