By integrating Saama’s Life Science Analytics Cloud platform, Merck aims to enhance its clinical development capabilities and expedite pipeline progress
Merck Research Laboratories in San Francisco, California (Credit: Coolcaesar/Wikimedia Commons)
Saama Technologies, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered clinical analytics cloud platform, has inked a multi-year agreement with pharmaceutical major Merck to create and operationalise a new clinical data layer for the latter.
Under the agreement, Merck will utilise Saama’s Life Science Analytics Cloud (LSAC) in order to enhance its clinical development capabilities and accelerate pipeline progress.
LSAC is an end-to-end clinical data management and cognitive insight platform, which is powered by machine learning (ML). The platform is designed with the objective to expedite clinical research outcomes.
By integrating the LSAC platform into its clinical development systems, Merck will aim to boost speed as well as efficiency related to the curation, ingestion, and transformation of data.
The integration is also expected to enable processing from several internal and external data sources to various business platforms and analytics requirements.
Saama Technologies founder and chairman emeritus Suresh Katta said: “LSAC will enable Merck’s team to optimise and automate processes, accelerate cycle times, and reduce costs in the quest to bring new treatments to patients sooner.”
Saama’s cloud-based, AI-driven solutions and services are claimed to provide strong data gathering, monitoring, analytics, and collaboration capabilities. These are said to enable sponsors and contract research organisations (CROs) to improve drug development procedures while lowering cycle times and maintaining data quality.
Merck Research Laboratories senior vice president, global clinical development head, and chief medical officer Eliav Barr said: “With the increasing demands of Merck’s growing pipeline, it is crucial that we continue to embrace the latest digital technologies to optimise and expedite our data management, clinical trial operations and biostatistics capabilities.
“By integrating Saama’s Machine Learning-driven platform across our clinical functions we aim to fuel significant process efficiencies and elevate the user experience for our talented clinical teams.”
In April 2022, Merck’s US and Canada life science business, which operates as MilliporeSigma, signed a deal to acquire Modular Automated Sampling Technology (MAST) platform, an automated, aseptic bioreactor sampling system, from Lonza.