Blinding ‘em with science

Business intelligence solutions provider SAS has been all over the industry news lately, today’s buzz proving no exception. Financial services group Sun Hung Kai Financial announced their selection of the SAS CRM solution. The Group, says press material is “aiming to extend its wallet share.” Hmm. SAS has developed a complete roadmap for optimizing Sun Hung Kai’s CRM strategy, from customer profiling to predicting customer behavior and implementing marketing campaigns. The initial process, establishment of customer-centric profiles, will take about three months. The SAS CRM solution is built upon the open-standards-based SAS(R)9 platform, and promises smooth integration with infrastructure. SAS Customer Intelligence also integrates with SAS solutions for other functions including compliance, risk management, and performance management. Earlier this week, SAS announced their new partnership with INC research. INC Research selected the SAS Drug Development program and the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform for its clinical data analysis and integration, attempting to combine SAS technology with their own products and services to solve life science industry problems.

The SAS data division, DataSpectrum, wherein client clinical research data is held, will be pulled into SAS Drug Development for analysis and subsequent integration with other clinical trial databases. INC Research licenses SAS Drug Development through a hosted model, allowing staff to focus on managing clinical trials while SAS provides installation and implementation support through its data center. INC Research represents the twenty-sixth life science organization using SAS Drug Development.

On the same day, SAS announced new genomic-analysis capabilities for the Drug Development program. The upgrade takes advantage of the burgeoning personalized medicine and genetic manipulation industries. By combining molecular and genetic information with clinical outcomes, scientists and researchers hope to maximize benefits in prescription medicines. More than 90 processes for genomic and proteomic-specific molecular analyses are now incorporated into SAS Drug Development, including genetic marker data, case control experiments or pedigree experiments; microarrays for gene expression or RNA transcript abundance data; and protemics for identifying protein biomarkers and their relation with disease or traits.

The solution hopes to directly address the US Food and Drug Administration’s Critical Path Initiative, and the goal is to allow the infusion of molecular information into clinical decision making while allowing life science organizations to facilitate regulatory compliance, meet requirements for traceability of analytical results and simplify global collaboration. This announcement was made at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Drug Information Association, at which SAS solutions for the life sciences were presented. In choosing SAS (or any provider, really), INC representatives described the same old dogs still chasing the science industry in general: compliance pressure, lower profit, an overabundance of information, etc. Other vendors using the SAS platform report similar situations.

Cognizant Technology Solutions is a member of the SAS Alliance (cue theme music) and assists client in safety and security detection. As Cognizant head of life sciences for North American Nagaraja Srivatsan puts it: “There are complexities to drug behaviors in broader populations that require a more comprehensive approach to analytics.” IMS Health reports optimizing of sales force resources with an SAS solution and Relsys International, a provider of software solutions for adverse event reporting, pharmacovigilance and risk management for the pharmaceutical industry, also felt the need to implement CRM in response to rising interest in drug safety and more advanced analytical techniques.

INC Research is a leading contract research organization with specialized therapeutic focus. INC is dedicated to managing all aspects of global clinical development programs for pharmaceutical and biotechnology clients. Through the INC DataSpectrum division, INC Research provides data management, statistical analysis and medical writing services to support global drug development requirements. Founded in 1976, SAS offers leading data integration, intelligence storage, advanced analytics and traditional business intelligence applications within a comprehensive enterprise intelligence platform SAS now boasts software customers at 40,000 sites worldwide.