PharmaSUG 2006 Attracts a Multitude of SAS Users

SAS users in the life sciences, biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries gathered in Florida in May for PharmaSUG 2006, a conference that included paper presentations, poster sessions and panels as well as hands-on workshops, software demonstrations – and even some recreation.

PharmaSUG is the world’s largest conference of SAS users in the quantitative health sciences, and this year the group held its annual users meeting in Bonita Springs May 21-24.

Anthony “T” Friebel, a Senior Software Manager at SAS who specializes in XML, delivered the keynote address at PharmaSUG 2006, providing an “Overview of the CDISC Landscape and an End-to-End Scenario.”

Friebel brought the audience up to date on the status of CDISC standards efforts and described the applicability of these emerging standards to the lifecycle workflow, and the effect on investment in current processes and legacy systems.

Learning the ins and outs of SAS
The conference offered more than 100 presentations in such subject areas as data management, applications development and public health research. In addition, attendees had the chance to talk individually with authors of 19 papers presented as posters during the poster sessions.

Year after year, one of the most popular features of PharmaSUG is the Hands-On Workshops. Eight such workshops were presented this year, ranging in topic from “ODS Reporting Techniques” and “An Animated Guide to the Data Step Debugger” to “CDISC Submission and Compliance Training” and “Creating & Importing Multi-Sheet Excel Workbooks the Easy Way with SAS.”

The conference also attracted a multitude of vendors, who were available in the Demo Room to show live demos and share details about their products.

It’s not all work ... games can be educational as well
In addition to presentations, workshops and demos, conference organizers offered attendees several opportunities for fun and games – as well as peer networking – in the form of courtyard volleyball, a quiz bowl and a “no money exchange” Texas Hold ’Em poker tournament.

In the SAS Bowl, participants competed to try to answer trivia questions about SAS software, the pharmaceutical industry and PharmaSUG.

PharmaSUG is a nonprofit organization headquartered in Chapel Hill, NC, and is not affiliated with SAS. The primary purpose of PharmaSUG is to provide a forum for sharing information and promoting new ideas about the use of SAS software in the pharmaceutical industry and in such fields as epidemiology, health economics, health management, outcomes research, biostatistics and clinical research.

The next PharmaSUG conference will be held June 3-6, 2007, in Denver, CO. Visit www.pharmasug.org for more information about PharmaSUG and its past and upcoming conferences, as well as abstracts and papers from previous conferences.