LONDON—In February, Citeline, part of Informa Pharma Intelligence’s suite of pharmaceutical, medtech and biomedical research and analysis solutions, and Saama Technologies Inc., a clinical analytics company, announced a partnership to integrate Citeline’s application programming interfaces (APIs) with Saama’s artificial intelligence (AI) and deep-learning solutions.
The goal of this strategic agreement is to bridge global clinical data and real-world data to improve both planning for and conducting clinical trials. Joint customers reportedly will gain “unparalleled insight into robust clinical trial intelligence” with greater efficiency than before.
According to the Informa partnership team of Jason Tse (head of strategic partnerships), Loni Branon (director of Sitetrove) and Alex Westbury (Citeline senior product manager), along with Crys Black, director of marketing programs for Saama Technologies: “In May of 2017, Dr. Dee Amanze [director of clinical consulting at Saama] reached out to the Informa Pharma Intelligence team to learn more about Trialtrove, one of the solutions in [the] Citeline clinical R&D intelligence suite. Dr. Amanze first worked with Andrew Spennacchio, senior corporate account manager at Informa, to learn more about Trialtrove’s unique blend of wide reaching and in-depth clinical trial intelligence. From there, it was clear that Saama and Citeline had the potential for numerous synergies, so we began exploring the potential for a partnership ... Thanks to Citeline’s new API offering, the Citeline-Saama collaboration was off to the races within a couple of months.”
Saama is integrating with Citeline’s APIs, including Trialtrove and Sitetrove, which provide users with the ability to go even deeper with search criteria and make better, more well-informed decisions, gain competitive advantage and optimize return on investment for their clinical trials. Combined with Saama’s real-world analytics, mutual customers will have smarter, more streamlined and successful clinical trials, the companies maintain.
As the Informa partnership team and Black say, “Citeline, part of Informa Pharma Intelligence, is the gold standard in drug, trial and clinical investigator intelligence. From protocol design to country and clinical investigator selection, to competitive landscape tracking, and staying informed on the latest clinical and regulatory events which could impact clinical trials, Citeline’s solutions help our clients quickly filter thousands of trials, drugs and investigators to find the most relevant data for their trial programs.”
As they note, the Citeline suite of clinical R&D intelligence solutions includes: the Pharmaprojects drug development database, which enables customers to track the global R&D pipeline from bench to patient; Trialtrove, a comprehensive source for the complete history of individual clinical trials, which allows customers to track and analyze the global clinical trial landscape; and Sitetrove, a robust solution for clinical trial site and investigator intelligence, which provides customers with access to over 400,000 clinical investigators and 160,000 trial sites to help them optimize their site selection process and greatly improve clinical trial success.
“Our core differentiator is not just the breadth and depth of our clinical trial intelligence coverage, but the fact that all of our intelligence is vetted by our global team of analysts,” maintain Black and the Informa partnership team. “We provide the market not only with comprehensive data they can trust, but the intelligence to help them make that data actionable.”
Reportedly, Citeline’s new APIs for trials, drugs, investigators and trial sites will enable clients to stream information directly from Citeline’s R&D intelligence databases into their own systems and integrate Informa’s quality datasets directly with third-party data and their own internal data.
“Saama’s Trial Planning Optimizer is the clinical trial feasibility solution that optimizes enrollment, investigator identification, site selection and patient burden,” note the Informa partnership team and Black. “By combining Citeline’s depth and breadth of data through the Citeline APIs and real-world data in the same platform, mutual clients have the best data with the best tools in order to make the best decisions.”
“This partnership represents a great use case for Citeline’s newly released APIs,” adds Tse. “We’re continuing to drive innovative products alongside our partners and bridge real-world data with our clinical trial information, tackling a growing unmet need in our industry. Through this partnership, our joint customers will be able to overcome clinical development challenges, gain industry insights, and optimize trial success through multiple points of triangulation.”
The initial focus is on improving trial planning and execution for both companies’ clients by integrating Citeline data into the Saama platform. In the longer term, they plan to explore how else AI can help those customers, as both companies have complementary strengths in that sphere and are keen to work on further collaborations and solutions.
“The partnership between Citeline’s expert clinical trial data and Saama’s award-winning AI-enabled technologies, which leverage both structured and unstructured real-world data, represents the next phase of intelligent clinical trial planning and execution,” according to Luke Stewart, director of product management at Saama. “Our partnership with Citeline fits nicely into our overarching strategic partnership initiative, which ultimately stands to collaborate with innovative companies to drive even more value out of our own proprietary content.”
