What is SAS Clinical Acceleration and Why Does it Matter?
SAS® Clinical Acceleration represents a paradigm shift in how life sciences organisations handle their most critical asset: data. It is a modern, cloud-native statistical compute environment (SCE) built on the powerful SAS® Viya® platform. Unlike legacy systems that rely on disjointed tools, this system accelerates discoveries in medical research by offering a unified, safe, and rule-compliant environment for managing, studying, and reporting clinical trial data.
In the high-stakes world of clinical development, speed and accuracy are paramount. By integrating all data ingestion, transformation, and analysis tools into a unified ecosystem, the entire workflow becomes more streamlined. This consolidation eliminates the friction of moving data between disparate systems, which ultimately helps companies file their research results faster, ensures comprehensive audit tracking for every data point, and significantly speeds up the delivery of life-saving new medicines to patients.
Manage clinical research data with confidence and accelerate the path to regulatory submission.
The journey of bringing a new therapy to market is incredibly complex, often taking over a decade and costing billions of dollars. Before a new drug or treatment can be approved by regulators like the FDA or EMA, it must undergo rigorous clinical trials that generate vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. This process is subject to strict global regulations and numerous operational challenges, making a specialised, purpose-built solution like SAS Clinical Acceleration not just an advantage, but an essential component of modern research infrastructure.
1. The Challenge: Navigating the Complexities of Clinical Research
Clinical development teams face major challenges that can delay research, increase risk, and raise costs. These challenges create a web of inefficiency, requiring a unified solution to restore order and accelerate progress.
- Data Integration: Teams must combine data from multiple sources, including labs, electronic data capture (EDC) systems, and contract research organisations (CROs).
- So what? Without a consolidated view, data integration and management become time-consuming and error-prone, delaying the entire trial.
- Different Programming Languages and Tools: Analysts and programmers on a single team often have expertise in various programming languages (like SAS, Python, or R) and prefer different tools.
- So what? Forcing everyone onto a single, restrictive system can stifle productivity and make it challenging to leverage the best tool for a specific task.
- Regulatory Burden: Life sciences organisations are required to comply with strict government regulations (like the FDA’s Title 21 CFR Part 11), which demand complete traceability of data and analysis.
- So what? Failure to provide a clear audit history or maintain data integrity can result in rejected submissions, costing millions and delaying patient access to new therapies.
- Decentralisation and Silos: Global teams often struggle with disconnected systems, making it difficult to establish a single source of truth for all trial data and collaborate effectively.
- So what? This lack of a central hub can lead to redundant work, version control issues, and significant delays in a process where every day counts.
SAS Clinical Acceleration is engineered to directly address these issues by providing a single, compliant, and open platform for the entire clinical analysis workflow.
2. The Solution: A Unified Platform for Clinical Analysis
SAS Clinical Acceleration is a Statistical Compute Environment (SCE) that combines several critical capabilities into one cohesive solution. This integration simplifies the clinical trial analysis and submission process, making sure everything is handled in a controlled, auditable environment.
- SAS® Clinical Acceleration Repository (CAR): This is the secure, central hub for storing and managing all clinical research data, programs, and documentation.
- Integrated IDE (SAS® Studio): This provides an integrated development environment where programmers can access repository content, write and test code, and manage their work in a personal workspace.
- Batch Submissions (SAS® Clinical Job Management): This component allows users to chain multiple programs together to run as a single job. For regulatory reproducibility, it generates a manifest file that records every detail of the run: who ran it, what was run, when it ran, and the exact inputs, outputs, logs, and versions used.
- Automated Workflows (SAS® Workflow Manager): This enables teams to automate their standard operating procedures (SOPs) and other business processes across the entire platform.
Together, these components create a comprehensive environment, but the system’s foundation lies in its robust, secure repository.
3. The Heart of the System: The Clinical Acceleration Repository (CAR)
The SAS Clinical Acceleration Repository (CAR) serves as the central component of the solution. Consider it like “Google Drive on steroids,” specifically designed for regulated clinical data. It offers more than simple storage; it provides a secure environment with embedded features that guarantee data integrity and comply with strict regulatory standards.
The table below highlights some of CAR’s most essential features for maintaining compliance.
| Capability | Why It’s Important for a New User |
|---|---|
| Version Control | Automatically tracks every version of a file (like a program or dataset), so you can always see how it has changed and revert to a previous state if needed. |
| Audit History | Creates a detailed, unchangeable log of every action—who checked out a file, what program they ran against it, when it was checked back in, and what the resulting output was—providing full traceability for regulators. |
| Electronic Signatures | Allows users to electronically sign off on documents and data, a critical requirement for regulatory compliance under rules such as 21 CFR Part 11. |
| Roles & Permissions | Lets administrators control precisely who can view, edit, or approve specific files and folders, ensuring that only authorised individuals can access sensitive information. |
One of the repository’s most powerful features is its “SCE-agnostic” approach, enabled by its use of REST APIs. In simple terms, this means you are not locked into using only SAS tools to interact with the repository. Data scientists and programmers can connect to CAR using their preferred languages (like Python or R) and development environments (like VS Code or Jupyter). Crucially, all interactions with the repository will be captured in the central Audit trail, ensuring complete traceability regardless of the tool used.
4. The User’s Workspace: Integrated SAS Studio
The integration with SAS Studio provides a dedicated and controlled workspace for programmers and analysts. The primary advantage is that it enables users to work on files from the central repository without ever altering the official, original versions until they are ready. This is accomplished through a secure and straightforward “check out / check in” process.
- Check Out: A user finds a file in the repository that they need to work on. They “check it out,” which copies the file to their personal workspace and locks the original in the repository, preventing other users from conflicting edits.
- Work: The user can now freely edit, test, and run the code in their own workspace, confident that they are not affecting the master version in the repository.
- Check In: Once the work is complete and verified, the user “checks it in.” This action uploads the new version to the repository, unlocks the file for others, and automatically increments the version number (e.g., from v1.0 to v2.0).
Crucially, every one of these actions—checking out, checking in, running a job—is automatically captured in the system’s audit trail. This ensures a complete, unbroken chain of custody for every file, which is essential for proving regulatory compliance.
5. The Power of the Platform: Why Being Built on SAS® Viya is a Game-Changer
SAS Clinical Acceleration is built entirely on SAS Viya, SAS’s modern, cloud-native analytics platform. This foundation provides several powerful advantages, making the solution more open, capable, and future-proof. For a new user, three of the most impactful benefits are:
- Open Integration: SAS Viya is designed to be open. This means users are not limited to SAS programming. They can seamlessly integrate and run code from other popular languages, such as Python and R. Furthermore, they can connect to the platform via various IDEs, including VS Code and Jupyter notebooks, allowing them to work in the environment where they are most comfortable and productive.
- Powerful Data Access: The platform includes over 80 built-in data connectors. This allows Clinical Acceleration users to connect to and work with data from virtually any source—whether it’s in a cloud database, an on-premise system, or a simple spreadsheet—without having to move it all into one place first.
- Future-Ready Technology: Being on the Viya platform means Clinical Acceleration can leverage the latest technological advancements. This includes access to modern tools like AI-powered co-pilots, which can help automate and modernise specific tasks along the clinical development process, such as transforming data to meet CDISC standards.
6. The Selerity Advantage: Focus on the Cure, Not the Config
While SAS Clinical Acceleration provides the engine for compliant research, maintaining a regulated platform requires specialised expertise. That’s where we step in.
Selerity is the safe pair of hands for mission-critical data systems. As a SAS Gold Partner with deep experience in the pharmaceutical and research sectors, we don’t just host the platform; we optimise it.
We wrap SAS Clinical Acceleration in a layer of expert managed support, ensuring your environment is always audit-ready, secure, and performing at peak efficiency. Whether you need to migrate your legacy clinical trials data to the cloud or require 24/7 monitoring to guarantee submission timelines, we simplify the complexity.
Ready to accelerate your clinical insights?
Don’t let infrastructure headaches delay your next breakthrough. Partner with Selerity to ensure your SAS environment is as compliant and capable as your research team.