SAS for Clinical Data Integration helps reduce time-to-market for new drugs

SAS streamlines data integration to eradicate errors and manual work that delay bringing novel therapies to market

Johannesburg, South Africa  (27 Jun. 2008)  –  SAS, the leader in business intelligence, this week announced a new solution to help pharmaceutical companies deal with the ever growing volumes of health-related research information.

SAS Clinical Data Integration Server will provide a new platform for life sciences organisations to define, manage, and automate their processes for aggregating medical data through the use of standards such as CDISC.

“Bringing disparate data sources together in a compliant manner is key to the patient safety issue and the industry goal of increasing the efficiency of clinical development,” says Alan Louie from Health Industry Insights, an IDC company. “SAS is bringing a powerful solution to market to help move the industry forward.”
 
Combining disparate data from multiple sources and systems can take considerable time, and can often result in errors and discrepancies that require unplanned time and resources to resolve. As research firms are faced with increasing amounts of clinical information, ensuring data integrity and complying with industry standards are more important than ever. 

By providing an environment covering both data structures as well as repeatable data handling processes, SAS for Clinical Data Integration will enable organisations to more easily bring together internal and external research data in order to conduct analyses. This first-in-class solution will unlock a whole series of needed operational improvements for research firms: improved data quality and timeliness; assured adherence to internal and industry-wide data standards; elimination of redundant work across research teams; and greater confidence in the integrity of research information over time and geography.

An integrated platform for standards
SAS for Clinical Data Integration provides a common platform to aggregate the many sources of research information across the entire drug life cycle – from discovery through submission – so that strategic decisions are based on complete, current information and handoffs occur seamlessly with no corruption or loss of data.

Standards supporting these types of improvements have been maturing steadily since the formation of the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) in 2000, and industry and regulatory recognition of CDISC’s SDTM and CRT-DDS standards has led to the incorporation of those standards natively into this new SAS solution. SAS for Clinical Data Integration allows organisations to ensure and enforce adherence to those standards and others in the course of their business operations.

In addition, the solution also gives companies the ability to analyse and document their use of specific standards over time, as well as investigate the potential impact of the introduction of newer standards into their environment.

Clinical Standards Toolkit
As part of this technology program, SAS will provide a new toolkit for validating the CDISC SDTM standard and producing the CRT-DDS (define.xml) documentation files. The toolkit, which is leveraged by the new SAS Clinical Data Integration Server, will be released this year at no additional cost to SAS customers using the analytics engine. The toolkit will enable SAS customers to easily validate the structure and terminology of their submission data and produce the associated CRT-DDS (define.xml) documentation file, supporting verification and validation of the full SDTM 3.1.1 specification including all domains and terminology requirements as well as writing CRT-DDS v1.0 including custom domains.

An integrated suite of solutions for Life Sciences
SAS understands that each stage of bringing a drug to market has unique needs. SAS Solutions for Life Sciences distinctly address these needs through a portfolio of integrated solutions that drive efficiencies and deeper insights throughout every stage of a drug's lifecycle: from discovery, through development, commercialization and beyond. 

Globally recognised as the industry leader in analytics, the de facto standard for clinical data analysis and the choice of 100% percent of the Fortune 500 life sciences companies, SAS assures accurate, comprehensive, and reliable analysis of pharmaceutical research and business data.

Pharmaceutical and biotechnology customers worldwide trust SAS to support their businesses, including AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly and Company, Genaissance Pharmaceuticals, ImpactRx, IMS Health, OSI Pharmaceuticals Inc., Sanofi-Aventis, Santarus, Inc, Solvay Pharmaceuticals, Speedel Experimenta Ltd, Synteract and Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

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