Daiichi Sankyo demonstrates a significant ROI with SAS Drug Development

Developing drugs involves managing clinical trials, and these days that means managing them globally. That can be a daunting task. With the deployment of SAS Drug Development, Daiichi Sankyo manages its clinical trial data without the need of a costly clinical trial data management system.

"We need to maintain rapid access to our global data to make informed decisions, and it has to be done cost-effectively,'' says John Wise, Senior Director of Informatics. "We want to spend money on drug development, not IT.''

The SAS solution was fully functional within six months of inception. With on-demand access to clinical trials data via its SAS clinical data repository (CDR), Daiichi Sankyo realizes savings in time, headcount and money – in the millions of dollars per year.
 
Saving time and money with SAS
Daiichi Sankyo works with contract research organizations (CROs) around the world. It needed to have a robust and globally-accessible, regulatory-compliant system for managing its clinical trials data. Before using SAS for its clinical data repository, data management in Daiichi Sankyo Pharma Development (DSPD) was much more challenging.

"As the demands of regulatory agencies increase, and the number of patients in clinical studies increases, it was just not cost-effective to do it any other way,'' Wise says.

John Wise, Senior Director of Informatics

Tedious delays no more
Before Daiichi Sankyo turned to SAS, transporting data was a tedious, labor-intensive process that caused delays and couldn't be done as often as DSPD researchers needed.

Because Daiichi Sankyo outsources the majority of its clinical trial operations, much of its data was housed with the CROs that performed the studies. That situation led to lots of delays as formal requests needed to be made to access data.

Now as data is loaded into the CDR and updated as frequently as required by the clinical team, researchers can use integrated review tools to get an on-demand overview of their clinical trial data. 

Savings 
The estimated savings of millions of dollars per year was realized by the following means:

• Reducing the time it takes to make thousands of data transfers per year from three days to one day per transfer.
• Reducing the time required to review data at the end of the study, which shortens the time to database lock.
• Reducing the external costs of data storage and retrieval.
• Increasing quality and decreasing time to provide on-demand access to DSPD's clinical trial data from any Daiichi Sankyo location.

"The value of a clinical data repository is monumental,'' says Sobeyda Good, Director of Data Applications and Support. "With SAS hosting the CDR, it's as though the CDR is in-house – but without the drain on our resources and data management infrastructure."

Bernd Doetzkies, Director of Informatics

Using SAS Drug Development as its clinical data respository helps Daiichi Sankyo speed the work of global drug development. "With SAS, we have no more delays because of geography," Good explains. "For example, despite the time differences, we can see the work of a researcher in Australia performed that day just as soon as we arrive at work the following morning in New Jersey. The data is there instantly.''

An elegant solution
“To paraphrase Occam’s razor:  When competing choices are available to provide a solution, select the one that is most simple. It was this philosophy that led us to choose SAS as the simple – yet elegant – solution to meet our data challenges,” says Dr. Ron Fitzmartin, Vice President, Informatics and Knowledge Management.

“Our vision for the clinical data repository model has been expanded, and we see SAS Drug Development as a hub to our interoperable platform environment of transformational information systems,” Fitzmartin says. 

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

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