Many of our authors often ask us where they can find real data that they can use without copyright or other confidentiality issues. Instructors too are always on the look-out for real-life data.

Well, thanks to a new initiative supported by SAS, you can now access data from more than 40 studies and 25,000 patients from clinical trials of prostate cancer, breast cancer, and melanoma treatments. The list of available studies is growing rapidly! See for yourself.

Project Data Sphere, founded by the CEO Roundtable on Cancer, brings together leading pharmaceutical companies to share data and an analytics platform to investigate those data. In support of Project Data Sphere and the research community, SAS hosts the platform and provides access to SAS Drug Development and SAS Visual Analytics at no cost to researchers.  For most studies, data is already available as SAS data sets, consistent with CDISC/SDTM requirements and ready for analysis using the web-enabled analytics platform.  Students, professors, and others in the research community are welcome to join this growing community of clinical trial researchers in the fight against cancer.

So what better time to write a book with all this data to play with! I’m headed to Orlando, May 17- 20, for the annual PharmaSUG conference. I will be at the SAS Publications booth in the demo room and would love to talk to you about your book ideas, whether you want to write your own book, review a book, or suggest a book idea. We are actively looking to expand our offerings to cover a variety of pharmaceutical topics; and so if you have an interesting application or experience in using SAS solutions, then please consider sharing it as a short book.

Please do stop by the demo room at PharmaSUG 2015 or email me if you'd like to set aside some time to talk.