Verticalized AI Research Division
Saama Technologies
Gregory T. Simpson, Vice President, Head of Marketing
gregory.simpson@saama.com
This past year, Saama created a new verticalized AI Research Division for clinical research that integrates the expertise of Saama’s existing AI research team with the skills of Saama’s technology developers. The goal of creating this new brain trust within Saama was to leverage AI in an unprecedented manner to ensure meaningful strategic outcomes versus only tactical outputs for biopharma.
The journey to establishing the division began prior to the global pandemic. However, the onset of COVID-19 created the added challenge of ensuring that this new offshoot was immediately optimized to support Saama’s life sciences customers as they raced to discover treatments and cures for the novel coronavirus. For example, a state-of-the-art AI automation platform was developed to ensure data quality and management for a COVID-19 vaccine trial involving more than 40,000 people. The infusion of natural language understanding and machine learning into the platform allowed data entry and data cleaning to take hours compared to months. Additionally, the team embarked on research to use its smart data applications to analyze and compare cough patterns between COVID-19 patients and healthy subjects. This work is helping to evaluate the inherent differences and draw near real-time conclusions to inform subsequent treatment.
Beyond COVID, the division offers other smart applications to support life sciences partners. The Smart Auto Mapper is a deep learning-enabled solution to ingest and map study-specific raw clinical data coming in a variety of formats into industry-specific standards such as SDTM, ADAM, and TLG. And the Smart Data Query can predict data discrepancies and accelerate the complex work of clinical data managers to ensure that clinical data is locked in time for analysis.
