SAS enhances clinical data management

The newly launched SAS Clinical Acceleration Repository, a cloud-native data repository with audit and administration capabilities enhances data management for life sciences and health organisations. This analytics platform manages clinical research data, and integrates with multiple data sources, enhancing clinical trial development and expediting regulatory submissions.

A common challenge for global companies is establishing a secure, sophisticated data repository to manage clinical data. This includes supporting clinical trial development from various sources, transforming and preparing the data for statistical analysis, and packaging it for regulatory submission.

Data management and governance challenges can delay clinical research. SAS Clinical Acceleration Repository provides a modular, open, cloud-native content repository for managing, reporting, sharing and reviewing data.

The benefits of SAS Clinical Acceleration Repository include:

• Access to curated research information and health data through a single system of record via an easy-to-use, user interface with dashboards.
• A production-ready data repository that enables easier and faster data validation. The solution supports groups and permissions, roles and privileges, electronic signatures, version control, search, and an audit trail, while enabling continuous monitoring and data preservation to support security, and regulatory and data standards compliance.
• A multi-lingual, open environment to support use of third-party programming languages and tools and data integration from many locations and sources, such as electronic data capture systems, in-house clinical data management systems, labs and contract research organisations.
• Access to SAS Viya enabled solutions and technology – proven to be 30 times faster than commercial and open-source alternatives – to improve efficiency and speed the path to submission.

 “SAS Clinical Acceleration Repository enables researchers and data scientists to better manage their clinical data and empowers organisations to make informed business decisions,” said Gail Stephens, vice president of Healthcare and Life Sciences at SAS. “Accelerating and improving the clinical development process helps bring therapies to market sooner and strengthens the bottom line for life sciences and health organisations.”

Synthetic data is increasingly being used in the healthcare and life sciences industries to train and test AI systems in place of or in addition to real-world data. To further support the data and AI needs for health and clinical research, SAS has introduced SAS Data Maker (currently in private preview).

 The powerful synthetic data generation capabilities of SAS Data Maker address data privacy and scarcity challenges by generating synthetic tabular data that statistically represents original training data without compromising sensitive patient health information. This enables healthcare and life sciences companies to innovate faster by combining trusted data augmentation and generation algorithms in one seamless tool.

Shadi Shahin, vice president of product strategy at SAS, said: “SAS Data Maker uses SAS’ cutting-edge, reliable AI models to create statistically accurate data points that truly augment existing data and can capture countless different scenarios, helping organisations better forecast outcomes so they can anticipate their businesses’ changing needs.

“This is particularly valuable in instances where specific real-world data is hard to come by or when there’s a need to detect rare case scenarios in highly regulated areas like healthcare and life sciences.”

 AstraZeneca, a global biopharmaceutical company, intends to use SAS Data Maker on the Snowflake Marketplace to empower its data scientists through the use of synthetic data to further improve decision making.

Brian Dummann, chief data officer at AstraZeneca, said: “Synthetic data can enhance our ability to make informed decisions from critical data, and thus has the real potential to help accelerate drug discovery and development, ultimately benefiting patients around the world.

“We look forward to leveraging SAS Data Maker and streamlining how data scientists can access synthetic data for their initiatives.”

The new healthcare and life sciences products are outcomes of SAS’ commitment of $1 billion to AI-powered industry solutions over three years. As outlined in the May 2023 announcement, the investment in AI builds on SAS’ decades-long focus on providing tailored solutions to industry challenges in banking, government, insurance, healthcare, and more.

* Learn more about SAS here.