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Globally, there is a high demand and need for a healthier and better quality of life. Regardless of economic status, every person wants to be fit and healthy. Saama Technologies is pursuing this goal relentlessly to help make it a reality in the most economical way possible. Saama Technologies focuses predominantly on meeting the drug development challenges facing pharma and biotech head-on, and obliterating the pain points by combining technology with science. Saama enables biopharma to successfully deliver safe and effective new medicines and vaccines to patients faster than ever.
Suresh Katta, the founder and CEO of Saama Technologies, is successfully harnessing and applying the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning through Saama’s award-winning, proprietary Life Science Analytics Cloud (LSAC) platform to deliver game-changing solutions that improve clinical trial outcomes. Suresh is passionate about partnering with biopharma companies to improve clinical efficiency and drug discovery to develop and deliver new therapeutic options to the patients who need them.
However, Suresh is not content with Saama stopping there, and has an unparalleled commitment to continuing to protect and promote human health by empowering the life sciences industry to forge the most efficient clinical development path possible to transform billions of lives for the better.
In a recent interview with Suresh Katta, he outlined the workings of Saama Technologies and what will be the roadmap for the company in the coming years.
I was driven by the potential of what is achievable if we provide intuitive intelligence to our powerful brains to solve the world’s greatest health threats. The world is relying on clinical development experts to make the best decisions possible when it comes to developing new drugs to treat existing and emerging diseases. Anything novel or new requires a lot of hard work. Resistance often comes from existing processes, people, and technologies. To overcome these challenges, one must persistently stay the course to build a fiscally responsible business, ensure that they attract the best talent, and also establish and nurture viable and productive industry partnerships.
Saama is the #1 AI-driven Intelligent Clinical Cloud company, enabling the life sciences industry to conduct faster and safer clinical development and regulatory programs. Today, Over 50 biotech companies use Saama’s award-winning, AI-powered Life Science Analytics Cloud (LSAC) platform on more than 1,500 studies, including many of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies. LSAC’s rich applications facilitate an unprecedented, authoritative oversight of comprehensive clinical research data, enabling companies to file New Drug Applications (NDAs) more efficiently and bring drugs to market faster.
Saama is the leader of the current evolution from e-clinical to ClinTech, the exciting new category of purpose-built, artificial intelligence (AI)-based clinical insights and automation platforms that is changing the face of clinical development. Life science companies are tossing the old clinical development handbook out the window as they reimagine the drug development paradigm by disrupting and improving the clinical operations continuum with AI. Sustainable transformation for drug development can be realized to achieve scale, acceleration, and repeatability across therapeutic areas. Though the “D” may still be positioned behind the “R” in the phrase “R&D,” it has finally caught up. The result: delivering safe and effective drugs to patients faster than ever before without impacting the quality.
Samma is empowering every persona in the clinical program with better intuitive intelligence for elevated therapeutic efficacy and safety, via its intelligent, out-of-the-box applications. Leading pharmaceutical companies recognize the new industry standard Saama is establishing for chief medical officers, directors of clinical operations, and their teams. In October 2021, the venture capital arms of Merck, Pfizer, Amgen, and McKesson, among others, invested $430 million in Saama. They are embracing how LSAC leverages smooth data flow from the patient to submission, enabling clinical trial sponsors and contract research organizations (CROs) to effective problem solving across clinical operations, medical review, data management, biostatistics, and pharmacovigilance.
Saama helped re-write the clinical development playbook. Vaccines typically take decades to develop. Saama helped compress that timeline to less than one year – a previously unimaginable goal. Pfizer used Saama’s technology – a domain-centric, deep learning/AI system called Smart Data Quality (SDQ) – to help them bring the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine to patients before any other company. This accelerated clinical development helped to turn the tide on the global pandemic. There is no going back now, and Saama is committed to helping other biopharma companies replicate similar success across the therapeutic spectrum to prevent a default to pre-pandemic clinical development timelines.
Last year Saama received eight industry awards, including:
Additionally, Saama recently welcomed two biopharma industry leaders to the Saama Board of Directors: Ian Read, former CEO and Executive Chairman of Pfizer, and Clive Meanwell, former CEO of The Medicines Company, who has been consistently recognized as one of the industry’s most efficient clinical scientists in terms of bringing new therapies to market.
Since the advent of modern medicine over the last two centuries, there has been much progress. However, it has been limited to creating cures and preventions for less than ten percent of known illnesses. The world called on Saama to help solve the global pandemic for a new disease, COVID-19, and we delivered. Saama is committed to replicating that success across the therapeutic spectrum to address the other 90 percent of human disease. There has been extreme innovation over the last decade by the best minds in the world in creating AI that can be instantiated for solving the toughest health challenges. Saama is leveraging that to solve the medical problems currently facing humanity.
Saama is committed to working on many unknown, rare diseases through our partnerships with our biotech customers. From a business perspective, developing drugs to treat rare diseases is extremely expensive and, though critically important to patients, often not profitable. Reducing the time and cost of developing such a drug allows a biotech company to focus on rare diseases as a viable option. Speed and quality are two big issues in this scenario and Saama enables both, helping biopharmaceuticals produce safer and more effective therapies for rare as well as more common diseases.
Since October 2021, Saama has been partnering with the corporate venture arms of major pharmaceutical companies, such as Amgen, Merck, Pfizer, and others to redefine the drug development paradigm. Recognizing the critical role Saama played in expediting COVID-19 vaccine development, this unique industry consortium, alongside the global investment firm Carlyle, made a $430 million strategic growth investment in Saama. We welcome this exciting new partnership and look forward to working closely together to further transform the life sciences industry across other therapeutic categories.
“Be unreasonably aspirational in solving complex clinical development challenges.”
“We are committed to giving our life science partners the power to significantly reduce cycle times and see around corners without sacrificing quality to make confident business decisions for better clinical trial outcomes.”
