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PHILADELPHIA—At the SAS User Group International Conference here last week, SAS Institute Inc. announced applications for the life sciences industry and previewed a forecasting interface.
The Cary, N.C., company announced the release of SAS Drug Development 3.0 and SAS Scientific Discovery 1.3, separate but integrated products built on the SAS 9 Business Intelligence Platform. SAS also demonstrated Forecast Studio, a product that provides a new interface for executing all the forecasting models supported by the SAS platform. Forecast Studio is planned for release in late summer, according to company officials.
Users will be able to set up forecasting projects, perform large-scale automatic forecasting, identify exceptions, override forecasts and construct their own forecasting models. Forecast Studio can select appropriate models automatically and choose influential variables that improve the model fit.
Grant Felsing, decision support manager for Briggs & Stratton Corp., in Milwaukee, said that thanks to his companys recent acquisition of Generac Portable Products, it will be selling directly to consumers, and its forecasting needs will increase.
“Before, our products were always in somebody elses products, and the need for forecasting was limited,” Felsing said. “Now, well be selling to consumers, and the need for forecasting is real.”
SAS Drug Development 3.0 is a collaborative application designed to improve data- and application-sharing among researchers during drug development. It adds analytics to evaluate critical trial data on new drugs. These analytics can be used to meet regulatory requirements, discover new markets and uses for drugs, and pinpoint product safety issues, SAS executives said.
A related product, SAS Scientific Discovery 1.3, adds more powerful analytic capabilities to drug research to help researchers discover promising drug prospects, based on those drugs biological and chemical properties and effects on the human body.
Scientific Discovery 1.3 contains two new analytic applications: SAS Genetic Marker, for characterizing genetic variability among patients and evaluating the association of that genetic variability with drug responses and adverse events, and SAS Proteomics, for identifying protein biomarkers and assessing whether they are related to disease status or drug effects.
Other products in the suite include SAS Research Data Management, for providing a centralized data repository and analysis management platform, and SAS Microarray, for microarray data analysis.