As I look back at our accomplishments in 2017, I am delighted at the progress we have made on many fronts to make Saama a very relevant contributor to the life sciences industry. Over the course of the year, we have expanded our global presence, achieved significant technological milestones, and added several industry luminaries to our Board of Advisors. Each step we took was in the direction of continued excellence.
A Brave New Year
As is the case with every success story, we too had a team of dedicated professionals who went above and beyond their roles and responsibilities to contribute to Saama’s ongoing success. It started with our funding event 2.5 years ago and our decision to pivot Saama from being a services company to an Analytics Solution leader in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. The intent was to build offerings that would help companies cure illnesses more quickly by bringing drugs to the market faster.
In 2017, we started to see our dreams come closer as we saw the well-known clients go live with our Clinical Solutions and took the opportunity to work with some of the greatest minds of our time.
We started by introducing a game changer in the life sciences data analytics world and followed it up with the launch of a cloud-based offering.
New Offerings to Change the Face of Data and Analytics
Over the summer, Saama announced the availability of Clinical Data Analytics as a Service (CDaaS). We built a comprehensive ecosystem that automates the whole process of ingesting a wide variety of structured, unstructured, Real World Data (RWD), clinical, and operational data. Leveraging CDaaS, Saama is able to construct a holistic and multi-faceted view of a given patient, which is useful in identifying cohorts for clinical trials and tracking their use and interaction with the treatments they receive.
In the fall, Saama announced the launch of our Life Science Analytics Cloud, which is designed to optimize clinical development processes and deliver outcomes by streamlining the steps of the entire clinical data journey. The suite offers a complete range of cloud-based clinical data analytics solutions for the Life Sciences industry.
The reception for both these launches was both overwhelming and validating. Most importantly, our clients gave us great feedback and we received a lot of interest from future customers. Especially exciting is the news that PM360 just named our Life Science Analytics Cloud as one of the most innovative products of 2017.
With an expanding suite of solutions, we also needed to expand our presence to venues where we could be closer to our clients and reach out to new talent.
New Offices to Foster Innovation
During the past year, we opened two new offices. Our Bridgewater, NJ office brings Saama closer to our current and prospective clients based in the pharmaceutical capital of the world. Our other new office is in Chennai, India, the hotspot of AI and deep learning research. We also brought on a new Vice President of Artificial Intelligence Research, Maliakannan Sankarasubbu, who runs the Chennai office and has built out a fantastic AI team. You can see their informative blogs on various AI topics on our site.
Each expansion shows our dedication to serving our customer better and staying on the leading edge of technological innovation.
The expansion plans were not limited to our offices and teams. 2017 also saw new additions to our Board of Advisors.
New Members of the Board of Advisors with Deep Industry Experience
Over the past year, we added the following luminaries to our BoA:
- Dr. Rebecca Daniels Kush, Ph.D., founder and former CEO of the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC)
- Christine Poon, former Vice Chairman of Johnson & Johnson’s Board of Directors
- John Hinshaw, former Chief Customer Officer for Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Makarand Jawadekar, Ph.D., who spent 28 years at Pfizer, where he served as Director of Portfolio Management and as Bench Scientist for the formulation of blockbuster therapy Zoloft (sertraline)
In addition to their deep industry expertise, each of these professionals brought their commitment to excellence and an unwavering desire to build something that will benefit everyone in the industry and help save lives.
Our constant commitment to excellence has not gone unnoticed.
New Year, New Promises
All of these advancements in 2017 have helped us move the needle significantly in our quest to deliver the most innovative clinical data and analytics solutions for the life sciences industry. We are determined, more than ever before, to build on our successes and make a bigger impact and contribution to the life sciences industry.
It has already been established that data now drives the pharmaceutical business; we plan to have the steering wheel firmly in your hands throughout 2018 and beyond.
I am excited to share our new scientific paper, An Attentive Sequence Model for Adverse Drug Event Extraction from Biomedical Text! You can read the full paper for free at the Cornell University Library . To share the extract with your network, please use this link .