Company: Gilead Sciences
Company background: Gilead Sciences, Inc. is a research-based biopharmaceutical company that discovers, develops and commercializes innovative medicines in areas of unmet medical need. With each new discovery and investigational drug candidate, we seek to improve the care of patients living with life-threatening diseases around the world. The company's mission is to advance the care of patients suffering from life-threatening diseases worldwide. Gilead’s therapeutic areas of focus include HIV/AIDS, liver diseases, hematology and oncology, inflammatory and respiratory diseases and cardiovascular conditions. Headquartered in Foster City, California, Gilead has operations in North, South and Central America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. Gilead makes it a priority to increase access to its medicines for people who can benefit from them, regardless of where they live or their economic status.
Contact: Sachin Sontakke
Title: Senior Director IT
Country: United States of America
Award Category: Community Uplift Award
Tell how you've used SAS to have a positive impact on your community?
Gilead Sciences has utilized SAS to analyze pre-clinical and clinical trials data as drug candidates move from early discovery to late-stage development. In addition, SAS is used to support data management, analysis, and reporting activities for both research and operational processes. It uses SAS for representing Statistical data in Graphical /Visual representation. This analysis is submitted to various agencies such as the FDA and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for drug approvals. It plays a critical role in getting approval on Gilead drugs from various agencies across the globe.
A very recent example was approval of Veklury® (Remdesivir), the first approved treatment for Covid 19 in October 2020. This has played a significant impact on getting the world out of Covid 19 pandemic. Gilead has a portfolio of 24 marketed products containing a number of category firsts, including complete treatment regimens for HIV and chronic hepatitis C infection available in once daily single pills. The impossible is simply what hasn’t been achieved yet. Gilead’s research and development program is focused on what’s next. We discover, identify and evaluate investigational compounds that show potential to advance the treatment of life-threatening diseases.
Research and Development data for all these drugs are analyzed using SAS. Using SAS, Gilead has changed the face of HIV infection from a terminal disease into a chronic disease and provided the first cure for hepatitis C, making possible the hopes of a long and healthy life for millions of patients globally. Gilead and SAS have created a significant positive impact on patients across the world.
What SAS products are you using and how are you using them?
Gilead uses SAS Computational Grid
Gilead uses SAS Computational Grid to collect, manage, analyze and visualize hundreds of terabytes of pre-clinical and clinical trials data and submitting trial results to FDA and other global regulatory agencies.
In addition, Gilead also uses JMP and is using SAS Viya in its subsidiary Kite Therapeutics. Gilead also plans to move to enterprise implementation of SAS Viya in near future (Currently performing proof of concept for performance).
What was your most surprising discovery about your work?
Anytime that a company like Gilead has an opportunity to change the trajectory of people’s lives all across the globe experiencing diseases like HIV/Aids, cancers and others, it is very humbling to say the least. We were surprised that the SAS analytics could be so powerful that it allowed us to successfully develop and discover new drugs that helped us impact the lives of all people, no matter their demographics. We could not have achieved these kinds of outcomes without tools like SAS.
The most surprising discovery about our work as it relates to our use of the SAS software is the depth and breadth of the use case, we have been able to use SAS. Across Gilead, we use SAS to quickly and efficiently find insights and conclusions that elevate our scientific understanding. Ultimately those insights change our communities we serve with safer and more effective treatments that change and save lives.
For a highly regulated industry, the ability to reproduce, validate and stand by our results is of utmost importance. SAS’s industry leading analysis software, backed by its years of experience in statistical analysis domain and its robust team of support engineers makes it possible to meet such standards. SAS has continued to modernize its offerings to provide scalable innovative solutions while maintaining its prowess in delivering analytics tools that meet the accuracy and precision standards needed by Gilead.
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