Headquarter In: Campbell, CA
Founded in Year: 1997
Employees Headcount: 1001-5000
Pharmaceutical executives are exploring methods to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. According to reports, a rising number of organisations are achieving current use cases, which is pushing the digital future of technology in business. Top pharmaceutical businesses are partnering with AI suppliers and using AI technology in their R&D processes and overall drug discovery.
According to surveys, approximately 62% of healthcare organisations are thinking about investing in AI in the near future, and 72% of businesses believe AI will be critical to how they do business in the future.
Saama, founded in 1997 by Suresh Katta, is the world’s leading AI-powered Intelligent Clinical Cloud provider, enabling the life sciences sector to execute quicker and safer clinical development and regulatory procedures. Today, over 50 biotech organisations, including several of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies, employ Saama’s award-winning, AI-powered Life Science Analytics Cloud (LSAC) platform on over 1,500 trials. The extensive applications provided by LSAC provide unparalleled, authoritative control of full clinical research data, allowing firms to file New Drug Applications (NDAs) more easily and bring medications to market more quickly. More information is available at www.saama.com, and Saama can be found on Twitter at @SaamaTechInc.
The Visionary Behind Saama
Suresh Katta is passionate about collaborating with biopharma businesses to increase clinical efficiency and drug discovery in order to create and offer novel treatment choices to patients in need. Suresh’s vision of effectively harnessing and deploying the power of AI and deep learning via Saama’s unique Life Science Analytics Cloud (LSAC) platform to create game-changing solutions that improve clinical trial outcomes has come true. Suresh, on the other hand, is not content for Saama to stop there, and has an unrivalled commitment to continuing to protect and promote human health by empowering the life sciences industry to forge the most efficient clinical development path possible in order to improve the lives of billions of people.
Suresh sits on the Board of Directors of The Association of Clinical Research Organizations (ACRO). He was designated PM360’s 2018 ELITE Entrepreneur and one of PharmaVOICE’s 100 Most Inspiring Leaders as one of the world’s most premier innovators who helps to drive excellence in the clinical domain. He is a frequent contributor to industry publications and is a featured speaker at industry conferences on the topic of accelerating clinical trials. In 2021, Suresh joined other thought leaders in the life sciences industry on PharmaVOICE’s Super Panel, “A Tech-Enabled Clinical Future.”
Suresh successfully founded two enterprises prior to creating Saama. He received his M.S. in computer engineering from the University of Southwest Louisiana, as well as his B.S. in electronics engineering from the University of Bangalore.
Extensive Offerings
Saama is the driving force behind the current shift from e-clinical to ClinTech, the exciting new category of purpose-built, AI-powered clinical insights and automation systems that is transforming clinical research. Life science businesses are throwing out the traditional clinical development playbook in order to rethink the drug development paradigm by disrupting and enhancing the clinical operations continuum with artificial intelligence. Sustainable drug development transformation may be done to gain scalability, acceleration, and repeatability across therapeutic areas. Though the “D” in the term “R & D” is still behind the “R,” it has now caught up. As a consequence, patients will receive safe and effective treatments faster than ever before, without sacrificing quality.
LSAC enables clinical trial sponsors and contract research organisations (CROs) to integrate, curate, and animate data for effective problem solving across clinical operations, medical review, data management, biostatistics, and pharmacovigilance. LSAC offers:
- Operations Insights
- Clinical Insights
- Smart Automation Applications
- Risk Based Quality Management (RBQM)
- Resiliency During Global Pandemic
As the pandemic swept the world in 2020, Saama assisted in rewriting the clinical development playbook for the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine. Vaccine development often takes decades. Saama assisted in shortening that timescale to less than a year-a previously unthinkable aim. Pfizer leveraged Saama’s technology – a domain-centric, deep learning/AI system dubbed “Smart Data Quality” (SDQ) – to assist them in providing the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine to patients. This rapid clinical progress helped in turning the tide of the pandemic. There is no turning back now, and Saama is dedicated to assisting other biopharma businesses in replicating comparable achievements throughout the therapeutic spectrum in order to avoid reverting to pre-pandemic clinical development schedules.
In October 2021, Saama reached another significant milestone: a $430 million strategic growth investment from a unique life sciences industry consortium comprised of corporate venture arms of major pharmaceutical companies such as Amgen, Merck, Pfizer, and others, as well as the global investment firm Carlyle. These prominent life science firms acknowledged the importance of Saama’s AI technologies, as well as the vital role LSAC played in accelerating COVID-19 vaccine development. Saama appreciates their collaboration, which will help to accelerate its strategic ambitions, such as extending its go-to-market skills and investing more in AI research and development.
Saama is now collaborating with this strong syndicate to reimagine the drug development paradigm. The team looks forward to working closely with new partner companies to further transform the life sciences industry across other therapeutic categories.
Also in 2021, Saama received eight prestigious industry awards, including:
“Most Promising Pharma and Life Sciences Solution Provider” by CIO Review.
“Most Innovative Companies” by PM360-the fifth year in a row to receive one of this publication’s prestigious Innovation Awards.
“Top 50 Workplaces in India for Women” by the Great Place to Work Institute.
Furthermore, Saama recently welcomed two biopharma industry leaders to its Board of Directors: Ian Read, former CEO and Executive Chairman of Pfizer, and Clive Meanwell, former CEO of The Medicines Company, who has consistently been recognised as one of the industry’s most efficient clinical scientists in terms of bringing new therapies to market.
Availing Healthier and Better Quality of Life
“Be unreasonably aspirational in solving complex clinical development challenges,” says Suresh. He goes on to say that Saama Technologies is primarily concerned with confronting head-on the drug development challenges that pharma and biotech face and eliminating these pain points through the relentless application of technology coupled with science. As a result, new safe and effective medicines and vaccines reach people in need faster than ever before.
Suresh recognizes the universal need for a healthier and higher quality of life. Through its collaborations with biotech customers, Saama is devoted to working on many undiscovered and uncommon diseases. From a financial standpoint, creating medications to treat uncommon diseases is exceedingly expensive and, while crucial to patients, is sometimes not lucrative.
By shortening the time and expense of producing such a medicine, a biotech firm may focus on rare diseases as feasible alternatives. Speed and quality are two major concerns in this situation, and Saama addresses both by assisting biopharmaceuticals in developing safer and more effective medicines for both uncommon and common ailments.
Suresh knows that everyone, rich or poor, deserves and desires to be fit and healthy. He believes this is doable, and Saama is working tirelessly to make it a reality in the most cost-effective way imaginable.
Advice for Emerging Leaders
As Suresh sees it, entrepreneurs in the drug development field must have a strong belief that they can create products or services that will uplift the quality of life for humanity. He states, “Entrepreneurs need to have the ability to attract a team of enthusiastic, capable clinical talent with a shared vision.” He further adds that they must build capabilities to transform status-quo systems, structures, and processes with solutions that are easy to consume.