CARY – SAS and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are partnering to prevent infectious disease threats from turning into a pandemic like COVID-19, the organizations announced this week.

SAS also announced this week that it has mandated all U.S. employees, regardless of work environment, to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

The partnership between the data and analytics company and the university will focus on the work of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Rapidly Emerging Antiviral Drug Development Initiative (READDI), which is now developing broad spectrum antiviral drugs, which are intended to be available “on the shelf” to prevent future pandemics, the organizations shared in a statement.

“SAS and READDI will use machine learning to prevent infectious disease threats from turning into a pandemic like COVID-19,” said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight in a statement.  “We will work with READDI to deploy our most advanced technologies to accelerate drug discovery.”

Currently, research and development teams based at SAS are using advanced machine learning techniques to integrate and study multiple biological data sets, including from what it calls the “deep lung environment of severely ill COVID-19 patients.”

The resulting analyses will be shared with researchers at READDI, where scientists will look for and identify targets for new COVID-19 antiviral drugs, the organizations said.  Additionally, the organizations will collaborate on other drug discovery processes for other antiviral drugs.

“What COVID-19 taught us is the importance of being ready, not reactive,” said John Bamforth, Director of the Eshelman Institute for Innovation at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy at UNC-Chapel Hill, in a statement. “We want to make sure that during the next pandemic we are prepared with approved drugs and therapeutics to allow the public health system to respond effectively.”

READDI was founded by the School of Pharmacy, UNC School of Medicine and Gillings School of Global Public Health.