GSK Takes a Leap Towards “Open Innovation” in Neglected Disease Research

Yesterday, GlaxoSmithKline announced a pledge to establish a data collaboration strategy in order to forward neglected disease research.  The first initiative is the creation of an “Open Lab,” a data collaboration project that will allow scientists to tap into the wealth of knowledge available to GSK while pursuing their own projects simultaneously.  GSK will also make available 13,500 promising malaria compounds resulting from a 2 million compound screen.  All data for these compounds, including structures and assay data will be made publicly available; this is the first time a big pharma has released data to the public in order to advance malaria research. Interesting commentaries have been posted on the In Vivo blog, BBC, and Times Online.

Many are realizing the value of collaborative research and data sharing for the advancement of drug discovery, which we fully endorse!

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!

We are excited to announce that the CDD database platform is getting a new moniker! In fact, there are three new names to look out for.

Why does it matter, why should you care?

Good branding, like good product design, is about defining and communicating the essence of a product and its function. Our goal is to have the names reflect the capabilities, the benefits, and the value of CDD for all of you clearly and succinctly.

To emphasize security and privacy, the core of our business, we’ve named the aspect of the platform in which customers archive and mine private data securely “CDD Vault™.” With a CDD Vault, only those with designated access have the ability to interact with the research contained inside. A customer’s secure login and password act as the combination to the valuable data inside. While CDD Vault focuses on the private nature of storing and managing molecular drug discovery data, we want to also highlight the spirit of teamwork involved in drug discovery.

In addition to the CDD Vault™, we are also introducing CDD Collaborate™ and CDD Public™.

CDD was founded on the principle that collaboration (private-to-private, pre-competitive, private-to-public, etc) is the key to streamlining drug discovery in the future. In the spirit of this collaboration, the ability to selectively and securely share data between peers and private databases has been named “CDD Collaborate™.” This is particularly useful for screening centers working with outside collaborators, big companies working with many parties, and virtual companies that outsource significant work. There are two modes for using CDD Collaborate™ – both are unique to CDD and cutting edge capabilities not currently in other technologies.

Finally, to acknowledge the contributions to our Public Access site and emphasize the community spirit fueling collaborations, the portion of the application focused on Public data sets has been aptly named “CDD Public™.” Read-only access is free-of-charge, read and write (with the ability to import/export and combine datasets) content access is available via the CDD Vault. Public Access registration allows a user to browse and mine a constantly growing body of drug discovery data contributed by top researchers and vendors around the globe.

Give us feedback on whether or not CDD Vault, CDD Collaborate, and CDD Public are clear – given the CDD business model, we strive to improve these offerings constantly, making them more valuable to our customers with increased use.

With these new brands, we hope to both qualify the primary functions of our database platform as well as strengthen the messaging behind our mission to catalyze humanitarian and commercial research.

“If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.”
        -Betty Reese

These powerful words only begin to describe the devastating disease known as Malaria. While all it takes to contract the disease is one bite from an Anopheles mosquito infected with the Plasmodium parasite, a steady stream of powerful drugs is necessary to cure it.  While those of us fortunate enough to reside in the western world need not even worry about contracting (let alone curing) this malicious infection, there are millions of people in this world who are not quite so lucky.

Malaria affects more than 300 million people around the world annually.  Of those people, about a million of them will die, the majority of them being children under the age of 5 and pregnant women.  The disease’s presence is known primarily in the equatorial regions, including (but not limited to) Central/South America and Southeast Asia; however it takes its biggest toll in sub-Saharan Africa, where more than 85% percent of malaria-induced deaths occur.  In these places, where the need for treatment is greatest, afflicted persons suffer the most from the lack of such treatment.  The simplest and cheapest of medicines, a drug called chloroquine, is showing an alarming decrease in effectiveness as the disease has gained resistance to this cure.  More advanced, widespread treatments containing a compound known as arteminisin can cost between 10 and 40 times that of chloroquine.  While there are prophylactic drugs available, there is no vaccine on the market.

It’s clear that Malaria must be eradicated. So what’s being done to stop this horrifying disease?

Groups have sprung up around the globe to offer their help.  Some, like the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, deal directly with aiding regions afflicted with the disease (such as providing mosquito nets and basic treatment plans).  Others like the Malaria Foundation International focus on the research side, providing scientists with resources and tools to further the advancement of drugs to combat the infection.

Here at Collaborative Drug Discovery, we offer a technological solution.  Our public-access database includes 5 datasets dedicated to studies of over 15000 compounds used in previous Malaria research.  We work with numerous groups of scientists in this area, providing our platform as a foundation for their research.  You can read about CDD’s contributions to overcoming the resistance to chloroquine in our recent Drug Discovery Today paper in collaboration with Dr. Christopher Lipinski, the McKerrow Group (UCSF), and the Chibale and Smith Groups at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.  These groups privately and securely used CDD, to identify both known drugs and new compounds that almost completely reverse chloroquine resistance!

CDD is one of the many groups that are doing their part in the fight against Malaria.  If everybody does their part, we can stop this disease from continuing to take lives.  World Malaria Day is April 25th, 2009.  Do your part to help stop Malaria.  If you think you are too small to be effective, just think about the mosquito.

For more information on Malaria, please visit the following websites:

• CDC Malaria Facts Page
• Gates Foundation Malaria Page
• WHO/TDR Malaria database
• Medicines for Malaria Ventures
• Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative
• Financial Times 2009 Malaria Report

The following is a rare note from the CEO’s desk:

Congratulations CDD – now you are 5!

April  1 of 2009 commemorates the fifth year since CDD was incorporated and spun out of Eli Lilly.  First and foremost, we thank our customers and the CDD community for all of their contributions that have allowed CDD to become an exciting and valuable tool for the drug discovery industry.  It is gratifying to see the market confirm that CDD has addressed researchers’ real needs.  We have new collaborators logging on daily and thousands of researchers consistently visiting CDD.  New customers are constantly signing up – equally from both industry and academia.

With a growing user base, we have many more requests for new capabilities to keep us on target.  Frankly, these include more custom requests than we can ever fulfill, but that is a healthy problem to have. And, paid services are always accommodated on time and within budget.  Recently, we’ve even seen customers routinely select CDD over the established vendors in our industry.  They appreciate the simplicity of using CDD to archive and mine drug discovery data, and our unique-to-the-world, secure, cost-effective collaborative capabilities. 
 
We look forward to sharing more positive developments at our 10 year mark!

Dear CDD Community,

Due to the overwhelming response and interest in the CDD platform and services for the Tuberculosis R&D Community following our announcement with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and presentations at the Keystone Tuberculosis conference, we are excited to inform you that we have made a major change to our policy and therefore wanted to make CDD’s policy about what we can do for free and what we would charge for crystal clear:

1. CDD will provide the CDD software access for Tuberculosis Research for free for any researchers, anywhere around the world for the two years for which we are funded. Upon registration with us (www.collaborativedrug.com/register) we will provide an account for which researchers can securely upload their data into a private site (by default). Any TB researcher can of course also decide to share this data with other collaborators or the community at large. Use for other therapeutic areas (where we do not have a subsidy) is available at our standard commercial rates (email: info@collaborativedrug.com). TB community members will benefit from complete access to our technology and the public datasets that we are helping to curate and publish.
2. By now making the CDD TB database available to the whole community – which is a massive undertaking – we will only be able to provide full support to these “pilot groups” for which we are funded, additional TB community members requiring our extensive support services will be charged for our value added services (training, support, scientific, computational, software – again email info@collaborativedrug.com and we’ll share with you what we can do to help with your scientific goals). CDD will however commit to provide one introductory phone call and GoToMeeting to any researcher working on Tuberculosis at no charge.

We encourage TB community members to contact us to register, and we will be glad to answer their questions. We believe our technology and work should benefit the whole TB community globally, and this new, generous policy should facilitate this. There is now no excuse for all TB researchers not to use the technology, because it is by default private, secure and 100% free to the TB community for two years.

CDD