Save the Date! 3rd Annual CDD Community Meeting, Oct. 1, 2009

CDD is pleased to announce that the “3rd Annual Collaborative Drug Discovery – UCSF Community Meeting for Catalyzing Humanitarian and Commercial Research” will take place on October 1st 2009 at the J. David Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco CA.

This prestigious (yet informal) single day meeting is open to the public for registration now and will feature leading researchers from academia, industry and foundations.  We are pleased to welcome back Dr. Lipinski and other dynamic speakers who we believe broadly will be of interest including our first presenters from Pfizer, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and our first biotech panel.  We are also currently accepting poster submissions.

In previous years, the meeting has been a special opportunity for researchers to share their work with members of the CDD community and the public at large.  This year, we continue this grand tradition with a much larger, growing, and increasingly mainstream drug discovery researcher community!

We are delighted to announce that so far the following stellar speakers are already confirmed:

• Christopher Lipinski, PhD, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow (ret.), Pfizer
• Ken Duncan, PhD, Senior Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• Chris Waller, PhD, Senior Director of Precompetitive Collaborations, Pfizer
• Tanya Parish, PhD, Acting Director of Drug Discovery, IDRI; Professor of Mycobacteriology, Queen Mary’s School of Medicine
• Clifton Barry, PhD, Senior Investigator, NIAID/NIH

We also have two panels lined up: one is focused on the advantages of data collaboration for commercial biotech companies.  In contrast, the second panel is on our original area of focus on more neglected disease research.

Whether you are a basic or applied research scientist, a business person networking, a student or postdoc interested in collaborative drug discovery, a member of the CDD community curious about what other members are doing or where the technology is going, or anyone who just wants to learn more about molecular drug discovery, we encourage you to register.

We hope to see you there!

The American Chemical Society’s Chemical & Engineering News recently published an article about the Pharmaceutical Industry adopting cloud computing technologies.  Frustrated with outdated, inefficient storage created through in-house information technology, several large pharma companies are turning to consumer Internet alternatives in database technology.

Finally!

Cloud Computing has proven successful in a variety of database storage situations (SalesForce.com being one of the most prevalent examples).  So why not molecular drug discovery research?  When it comes to data management, this field has survived on everything from large scale local database platforms to individuals within a laboratory sharing data via e-mail.  Here at CDD we saw the power of cloud computing, and the need for it in this industry.  It’s good to hear that we’re not the only ones.