SAS and NC State launch two-year AI health research pilot

2 October 2026 — SAS and NC State University launched a two-year AI health research pilot on 1 October, 50 years after an agricultural research project at the university gave rise to SAS, the company said in its announcement.

SAS returns to NC State research

The initiative, called the SAS Think & Do Tank, will connect the company’s data, AI and analytics work with researchers in NC State’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, SAS said. The partners plan to work on human health, nutrition and environmental resilience. SAS says it intends to incorporate responsible AI practices into the research from the outset.

SAS’s original analytical model was developed at NC State to improve the analysis of agricultural data, Axios reported. The company has since become a multibillion-dollar analytics business and has invested heavily in AI capabilities in recent years, according to Axios. The new pilot brings the company back into a research partnership with the university where it began.

Jim Goodnight, SAS’s chief executive, said the arrangement would combine NC State’s work across disciplines with the company’s data, AI and industry expertise. He described responsible use of the technology as part of what students and researchers would need to learn alongside its technical capabilities.

NC State Chancellor Kevin Howell said the university and SAS planned to create opportunities for students, faculty and industry partners to apply AI. SAS says faculty and students will work with analytics on active research projects, with attention to data practices and transparency.

NC State’s predictive biology work

One of the pilot’s initial research efforts will address translational predictive biology. SAS says the work will use biological models, data and AI to predict how diseases and possible treatments behave in humans. The proposed use is at the research stage: the partners aim to give scientists better evidence for choosing which interventions merit further study.

NC State researchers are developing a process that links studies in living systems with laboratory models, according to SAS. Those models include organoids, which are simplified structures grown from cells to resemble organs, and organ-on-chip technologies that imitate aspects of organ function. The partners want to analyse results across these different biological settings.

The data present a specific difficulty for the proposed AI work. Researchers can collect extensive information about cells, tissues and molecular processes over time while working with relatively few biological subjects, SAS says. The company says conventional AI models can find patterns in such data that fail to persist across studies or carry over between biological systems.

The research team plans to explore statistical and AI methods suited to those datasets, SAS said. The planned models would account for relationships within biological systems, measure uncertainty and help researchers understand the basis for their outputs. Those aims address the reliability problem SAS identifies in analysing small sets of biological subjects.

SAS says more dependable predictions could help researchers select promising treatments earlier and investigate why an intervention works or fails. The company expects that, over the longer term, this approach could reduce the time and cost of moving therapies towards clinical use. It also says the work could produce datasets that allow findings to be compared across studies.

SAS’s role in the two-year pilot

SAS says it will act as a technical partner to the research working groups, supplying data and AI software, expertise and guidance on responsible AI. NC State’s faculty and students will apply analytics within the research, according to the company. The pilot’s stated scope covers the research collaboration as well as the tools used in individual studies.

The partners also intend to work on nutrition and environmental resilience, SAS said. For the university, Howell described the collaboration as a way to involve students, faculty and industry partners. For SAS, the project links its current AI work to the agricultural research from which the company originated.

SAS describes the Think & Do Tank as a two-year pilot intended to develop a governance and research collaboration model. The company says that model could eventually be applied in other disciplines and at other institutions.