By Benjamin Ross

May 17, 2017 | d-Wise, a privately held North Carolina-based clinical software provider, recently launched their Clinical Acceleration Platform, a “pay-by-month/pay-by-study” cloud-based platform that would help provide designed turnkey validation in a prompt, efficient manner. The platform was designed by experts in SAS, a statistical analytics company, and is a SAS-compliant environment.

In the modern world of clinical software, both analytics and speed are critical to companies in the biotech and pharmaceutical field. Having worked with SAS since 2003, d-Wise understood that it was important to design a system that performs well and is reliable for the user, and scales for the business in the beginning to avoid pain points later on.

“We’ve heard you say that you depend on SAS and other tools like R, that you need to get up and running quickly, that you need a packaged solution,” John Leveille, CEO and Co-Founder of d-Wise, told listeners in d-Wise’s recent webinar. “So that message that you’ve sent to d-Wise is really clear: enable us to get our work done.”

d-Wise, who currently serves “1,000-2,000 users globally” according to Baker, is looking to push their platform toward three main audiences: emerging biotech and pharma companies, CROs, and the larger entities in pharma and biotech. Each of these audiences has different needs, according to d-Wise’s Senior Client Engagement Manager, Stephen Baker, who joined Leveille in the webinar.

Emerging biotech and pharma companies use SAS, and might likewise use d-Wise’s platform, as the de facto platform for clinical analysis and submission. CROs might use d-Wise’s platform because they are service providers and have multiple pharma sponsors and biotech clients. Each of these clients have different studies, and they need an environment that can scale to take on additional clients and can allow their users to move seamlessly across those environments. The large pharma and biotech companies might already have a SAS computing environment, but from time to time the existing system might not have the capacity to tolerate the acquisition or divestiture or the accelerated study activity that needs to take place quickly.

d-Wise and SAS partnered in March with the Managed Analytic Services Providers (MASP) program, which is a distribution method that will help customers implement SAS and supplement technology in ways that uniquely benefit the individual company.

The d-Wise Clinical Acceleration Platform is a validated system that a given user can updated depending on the growth or burden of the company; it is not a closed platform. The flexible system lets users stores relevant data on d-Wise’s data center in which d-Wise owns all of the compute assets, the servers, the storage, the backup appliances, and the routing. “We own all of the componentry and our team puts it together in a fit-for-purpose way and makes sure that it performs. That gives us the fine grain control that we need to make sure it’s going to survive validation concerns and also it’s going to perform the way that you expect,” Baker said.

In the webinar, Baker was quick to point out the enormous amount of energy and time placed in clinical systems validation. “A life-sciences company has to negotiate a SAS license, they have to figure out budgetary considerations, figure out the demand for SAS (How many people? How many studies?), they’ve got to get hardware in place coming up with a validation plan, they’ve got to execute an installation and hope that they’ve built it in a scalable way that’ll grow in the business,” he said. “It’s a very complex thing.” d-Wise is able to bundle all of these tasks with a SAS license already included.

That’s not to say that the SAS environment is the only one included in d-Wise’s platform. Common technologies embedded with SAS include the Microsoft Office suite, R, Adobe, and CDISC. “We know on a day to day basis data management users, clinical associates, and bio-statisticians need more tools,” said Baker. “SAS is an important part of the puzzle, but it’s not the only part.”

d-Wise will be presenting this year at the 15^th annual Bio-IT World Conference & Expo May 23-25.