Saama Partners With The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society & Unveils New Capabilities for Award-Winning Life Science Analytics Cloud

Saama Technologies, Inc. recently announced a new partnership with The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS), the world’s largest nonprofit dedicated to fighting blood cancers, to accelerate the development of novel acute myeloid leukemia (AML) therapies through its unprecedented Beat AML Master Clinical Trial. LLS will deploy Saama’s award-winning Life Science Analytics Cloud (LSAC) to enhance the operational and clinical conduct of the ongoing, multi-drug, multi-site precision medicine trial. The announcement came during the 10^th Annual Summit for Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE) in Orlando.

The Beat AML Master Clinical Trial’s innovative precision medicine approach employs comprehensive genomic profiling (CGP) to find and match specific AML genetic mutations in newly diagnosed patients over age 60 with an investigational drug or drug combination that is potentially best suited to attack the specific molecular mutations causing the cancer.

“Combining Saama’s LSAC solution with the amazing work currently in progress at Beat AML trial sites across the U.S will enhance and expedite data collection and analysis, generating insights that will inform critical decisions to accelerate the discovery of promising new AML therapies,” said Murali Krishnam, Senior Vice President of Ecosystem Innovations at Saama Technologies. “Saama is proud to welcome LLS to its partner ecosystem and further advance clinical trial conduct through our open innovation framework.”

LLS has assembled an impressive network of Beat AML partners, including the US FDA, top cancer centers, multiple pharmaceutical companies, a contract research organization (CRO), and select technology experts, who have united to tackle AML.

“LLS selected Saama to be part of our groundbreaking Beat AML Trial because their AI-powered LSAC solution has the ability to provide rapid insight into clinical data that will advance our study operations,” said Len Rosenberg, PhD, RPh, Head of Clinical Operations at The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. “We look forward to the insights Saama and LSAC will add to our novel Beat AML umbrella trial, which is changing the paradigm for AML treatment and which has already yielded invaluable information in the two years since it got underway.”

More than 20,000 Americans are diagnosed with AML, the most lethal of the blood cancers, and 10,000 die from AML annually. The five-year-survival rate for older adults remains dismal at less than 20%. Despite advances in treating other blood cancers, the standard of treatment for AML has remained the same for more than 40 years.

“The team at The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society are pioneers when it comes to personalized medicine. Their position as a non-profit organization has allowed them to facilitate and execute a complex umbrella trial in close collaboration with a number of stakeholders,” said Kenneth L. Massey, Chief Life Science Officer at Saama Technologies. “The life science industry as a whole is counting on their success, which will hopefully be the catalyst that fundamentally changes the way clinical trials are executed. We are equally excited and humbled to be given the opportunity to be part of this landmark trial.”

Saama Technologies, Inc. also announced it unveiled three new, machine learning-based capabilities that extend the existing functionality of its award-winning Life Science Analytics Cloud (LSAC). Saama announced the addition of these state-of-the-art programs infused with artificial intelligence (AI) – Virtual Assistant/AI, Operational and Financial Risk Mitigation, and Drug Efficacy and Patient Safety Analytics — during the 10^th Annual Summit for Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE) in Orlando.

“This trio of new LSAC proficiencies demonstrates Saama’s commitment to strategic, targeted and pragmatic deployment of AI to continually advance clinical operations,” said Mr. Sankarasubbu. “These exciting new features are the first in a series that will be launched throughout 2019 to exponentially enhance the value of our LSAC platform for Saama’s life science partners. These new features translate into clinical trial time and cost savings and, ultimately, safer and more effective drugs.”

Saama’s 2018 introduction of its Deep Learning Intelligent Assistant (DaLIA), a context and domain-aware conversational user interface for LSAC, shifted the human-computer interaction paradigm. Saama has expanded DaLIA’s capabilities even further, broadening its capacity for identifying the intent (what you would like to do or know) of the query and catapulting the Virtual Assistant to an enhanced level of conversational user engagement. When DaLIA replies to a researcher’s question about study conduct, whether from an operational or clinical perspective, it is now enabled to factor in key parameters, such as the names of persons, organizations, and locations, as well as expressions of times, quantities, monetary values and percentages. DaLIA remembers the context of previous inquiries and can seamlessly enfold new entities into the discussion to provide rapid clinical operations insights. Queries about various aspects of clinical development, including start-up, enrollment, data quality and financial risk, result in responses that factor in the intent and specificity of the questions. This allows DaLIA to mine the data resources from an enterprise’s LSAC deployment and provide answers.

Saama’s new Operational and Financial Risk Mitigation significantly advances the ability to track clinical trial key performance indicators (KPIs), managing and mitigating operational and financial risks. Saama is implementing an auto-ML model into LSAC that provides the ability to go beyond the current industry standard of tracking only planned and actual KPIs. This novel feature predicts when critical KPIs, such as first site activated, first and last patient enrolled, etc., will be achieved, empowering researchers to make subsequent, in-flight decisions about and modifications to a clinical trial. Saama’s Operational and Financial Risk Mitigation eliminates the need for clinical teams to run their own labor-intensive analyses to approximate these important milestones. LSAC will use historical data from various trial sites and automatically apply the appropriate machine learning algorithm so customers seamlessly see site-related predictions. Operational and Financial Risk Mitigation provides researchers with the power of information, enabling them to make decisions and course corrections before obstacles delay a trial.

Saama’s LSAC is now also informed by an ML-based Drug Efficacy and Patient Safety Analytics feature that significantly streamlines the time and effort traditionally required to correlate patient profiles with data variables. With effective clinical data management and standardization, upwards of 50 variables can now be analyzed simultaneously by LSAC for immediate identification of patient outliers, versus the current, time-intensive process of trial staff manually examining only a few variables at a time. The new feature fundamentally changes clinical trial medical monitoring, enabling researchers to identify previously undetectable patient deviations, as well as potential corresponding safety and efficacy issues, sooner than ever before. Saama estimates that the new Drug Efficacy and Patient Safety Analytics capability will result in an approximately 30 percent savings in clinical trial staff time and effort by rendering the need to rely on manual data analysis obsolete.

Saama Technologies is the advanced clinical data and analytics company, unleashing wisdom from data to deliver better business outcomes for the life sciences industry. Saama’s unified, AI-driven clinical data analytics platform seamlessly integrates, curates, and animates unlimited sources of structured, unstructured, and real-world data to deliver actionable insights across all therapeutic areas. The award-winning platform gives unprecedented real-time visibility into clinical data, enabling sponsors to file New Drug Applications (NDAs) more efficiently to bring drugs to market faster and at lower costs. For more information, visit http://www.saama.com.