CDD Thoughts on Data Sharing

As we enter the holidays, the season of giving and sharing, we here at CDD reflect on our commitment to broadening precompetitive collaboration and data sharing in the drug discovery ecosystem.

We see this as the necessary and sufficient condition for enabling the economics of specialization for both humanitarian and commercial drug discovery.

We are doing our small part along with a growing number of collaborators to promote a dialog on the importance of appropriate data sharing in the pharma and biotech arena. In the last few months we’ve published three articles.  The first editorial, authored by Sean Ekins and our board member Alpheus Bingham, outlines features of industrial competitive collaboration. The second paper, co-authored with Antony Williams of the Royal Society of Chemistry focuses on sharing precompetitive ADME and toxicity related data on the web, as there is the potential to learn from the errors of others and not repeat them.

CDD has also published a paper in Touch Briefings – Drug Discovery Informatics with a focus on drug discovery moving to integrated web-based sharing tools.

This of course is in addition to abstracts at Keystone, Gordon, other major conferences, and our own annual community meeting in 2009.  This year was a year of growth for CDD, from expanding our neglected disease work with the Gates Foundation, the release of CDD3, and broader pharmaceutical industry collaborations.  We’re confident that in 2010, the industry (in particular the major biopharmaceutical companies) will continue to expand precompetitive and competitive collaborations, and we will certainly do our part to help.

We would like to wish our friends and collaborators around the globe happy holidays and look forward to even more exciting developments in 2010!

Just in time for the holiday, we are happy to announce the beta release of a much-requested feature addition to CDD Vault: Scatter Plots.

Before we delve into details, note that we’ve implemented this feature without requiring the installation of additional plug-ins and in a way that works for all supported browsers (and even some unsupported ones).

We want to stress that this is a beta release, meaning that while everything pretty much works, there are a few kinks to be worked out and the performance is not yet where we want.

Scatter plots are accessible from the search page once you have run a query.

Clicking on this link opens a new Plotting & Statistics window. You can open as many of these windows as you like with different results in each one, and each window can be expanded full screen.

For this initial release, we have implemented several useful options including axes selection, series configuration, and display configuration.

It’s possible to zoom in on any region of the plot by mouse selection and view details about any particular point by just hovering the mouse above the point.

At any time you can save the current plot as a PDF, which you can then drag and drop into PowerPoint or Microsoft Word for presentations and reports.

We are actively working on improving the speed of data loading, and with that the number of data points that can be displayed at once. We also plan to allow plotting readouts from one protocol/run against another (we just have to work out what to display when a given batch of a molecule has multiple readout values in a protocol). Down the road, we plan to add more plot types (histograms and box plots). Most of all, however, we want to hear your feedback and suggestions for what would be most valuable.

You can read the full release notes that include other minor fixes and enhancements we work on as an ongoing effort to streamline CDD by logging in.  If you do not have an account and want to see scatter plots for yourself, you can register for a free CDD Public account.