CDD Invites Scientists to Join Free Public Data Collaboration Project

Here at CDD we want to help researchers interested in archiving and publishing their data for the greater good of the community.

We were struck in two ways by the surge of interest in GlaxoSmithKline’s recent publication of malaria drug screening data on CDD (see our earlier post for details). First, it’s clear that public data sharing invigorates the entire drug discovery ecosystem. Second, we have been inspired by the outpour of goodwill by scientists wishing to help.

Because we have the technology to let researchers share data for free via CDD Public, we’ve decided that’s exactly what we’re going to do: provide free CDD access to researchers interested in archiving and publishing all their data for the greater good of the community.

With the barriers to precompetitive data sharing coming down, it is our wish to continue to receive and publish new data sets useful both to our client base and to the scientific community at large.

If you want to join the revolution and share data with the larger community, email us at:

publish@collaborativedrug.com

Click here to go directly to the Wall Street Journal article, “GSK Tries a Linux Approach.”

Guest Blog from Dr. Sylvia Ernst (CDD Senior Director, Community Growth)

What would make a publicly traded large Pharma company open up their treasure chest of internal well protected secret screening data and make them available to the world? “Ha! – Nothing!” or “Never!”, you might say…

Well – buckle up – the world of Drug Discovery has officially changed today, May 19th 2010. GSK, GlaxoSmithKline, did just that: Screened 2 million compounds, found more than 13,500 with activity inhibiting the Malaria parasite. And instead of trying to continue on the beaten (Drug Discovery)-path and make a new drug at GSK for sale – they published those active compounds with their data to the whole world, sharing a wealth of research IP. WOW!

We here at CDD are tremendously proud to be part of this historical event but also truly delighted as this touches onto our key mission: To help accelerate specifically the discovery of new, effective and affordable drugs to fight diseases like Malaria, Tuberculosis and the like, neglected diseases. Neglected they are typically because corporations prefer to focus their resources on making shareholders happy by selling what rich markets buy. Nonetheless – those neglected diseases are killing millions of people, many of them children every year in terrible ways while effective, affordable treatments are badly needed but commercially unattractive to go after (I personally think quite passionately that treatments here are so much more needed than for “lifestyle ailments” of the rich markets).

So – historically this step is an almost evolutionary leap in thinking about the intersection of economic markets and humanitarian needs. Also – not just because a large Pharma company is sharing their treasure to help in a non-commercial way to fight one of the worst diseases on the planet but also because this may be the dawning of an entirely new paradigm on how to find new drugs: By involving the global research communities, harnessing the power of millions of scientists and labs with their expertise, intelligence, creativity. This is crowd-sourcing at its finest.

This is the seed – water, nutrients, and sun are welcome from all of you.

Read more about this historic event in the Wall Street Journal.

Collaborative Drug Discovery was mentioned in an article in the Wall Street Journal: Bill Gates Takes Stake in Creating New Drugs

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!

Last Thursday, CDD held its 3rd Annual Community Meeting for Catalyzing Humanitarian and Commercial Research, at the J. David Gladstone Institutes at UCSF Mission Bay in San Francisco. With over 180 registrants as well as ten guest speakers and panelists, the event was an eye-opening exposé into the issues facing academics, non-profits, biotechs, and pharmas regarding data management and collaboration.

The meeting was kicked off by a training session led by Kellan Gregory, CDD’s Head of Community Interests. Kellan demonstrated new capabilities in the 3rd generation of the CDD web application (CDD3) that has just been released over the past weekend. These included mapping templates, simplification of data input, and a more elegant GUI.

Ken Duncan talks TB

After Stephanie Robertson, PhD of UCSF welcomed everyone to the meeting, the first two speakers presented, focusing their talks around Tuberculosis research. Ken Duncan, PhD, Senior Program Officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation indicated the need for a better understanding of Tuberculosis biology as well as developing novel imaging/genomic technology on the pre-clinical and clinical side. Takushi Kaneko, PhD, Senior Project Leader of Research from the TB Alliance outlined the challenges of Translational Research for a Foundation as well as how CDD was used to address these needs across multiple collaborations.

Andrea Altieri, PhD, from ASINEX highlighted novel compounds in CDD containing characteristics similar to natural products using 3D Frameworks. CDD’s own Moses Hohman, PhD, VP of Development then followed up on Kellan Gregory’s showcase of CDD3 from the development perspective, highlighting the process for implementing new features while ensuring a high level of quality by having four lines of automated tests for every one line of new code.

After a lunch break during which our poster presenters were given the opportunity to showcase their work, Sean Ekins, PhD (CDD Collaborations Director) chaired a Biotech Panel consisting of Marc Navre (Ardelyx), Ellen Berg (Bioseek), Christopher Silvia (Icagen), and Bard Geesaman (PharmSelex). The panelists stressed the importance of communication, collaboration, and blending technology and interpersonal skills in industry.

Chris Waller, PhD, gave a talk highlighting his role as Senior Director of Precompetitive Collaborations at Pfizer by speaking about the Pistoia Alliance, an initiative between the major pharmas to facilitate collaboration in precompetitive areas (such as establishing standards and partnerships as well as technology transfer). Tanya Parish, PhD, brought the audience back to TB research. Speaking as both the Acting Director of Drug Discovery for IDRI as well as a Professor of Mycobacteriology at Queen Mary’s School of Medicine in UK, she pointed out that as collaborations across the globe increased, sharing data becomes complex. As such, she discussed how CDD is helpful for tracking target validation as well as screening data.

Bringing it all together, with (L to R) Sean Ekins, Stephanie Robertson, Tanya Parish, Ken Duncan, Christopher Lipinski, and Chris Waller

Christopher Lipinski, PhD, ex-Pfizer, Scientific Advisor to Melior Discovery as well as a member of CDD’s SAB, gave a provocative talk on the need for biological and chemical collaboration, illustrated by examples where “beautiful biology is ruined by bad chemistry.” He also showcased how these instances could be prevented through a system of alerts. These alerts, provided within the CDD software framework, would warn biologists working with compounds of the presence of chemistry related problems.

Barry Bunin demoed CDD3 live and presented a roadmap for the future of the CDD Platform (CDD Vault^TM, CDD Collaborate^TM, and CDD Public^TM) – which by its nature always improves with new features, collaborators, and data. He encouraged the audience to dream about new possible technologies and collaborators.

Finally, a second panel consisting of Sean Ekins, Stephanie Robertson, Tanya Parish, Ken Duncan, Christoper Lipinski, and Chris Waller convened and talked about the “what ifs” in the future of drug discovery, namely, if they could change one thing about the industry, what would that be? It was an exciting discussion, fairly showcasing the ups and downs in the drug discovery industry.

Congratulations to Sherida Johnson from the Burnham Institute for winning the best poster drawing, and Maruti Didwania from Stanford University for winning the evaluation form drawing!

At the end of the day, it truly was an honor for CDD to have such talented guests from every part of the drug discovery ecosystem. It was also great to have so many interested attendees share in this wonderful experience. We’ve enjoyed hosting these meetings immensely, and we plan on doing it again. See below for uploaded PDFs of approved slides from our speakers.

Sherida Johnson celebrates her best poster win with Christopher Lipinski. Rule of What?

Here are links to approved PDF versions of the talks (they are large files, so don’t worry if it takes some time to open):

Barry Bunin, PhD (CDD)
Ken Duncan, PhD (BMGF)
Christopher Lipinski, PhD (ex-Pfizer, Melior Discovery)
Chris Waller, PhD (Pfizer)
Andrea Altieri, PhD (ASINEX) – to obtain the presentation made by Dr. Altieri, please e-mail him or his colleague Mark Parisi for details.

Below are links to two blogs to give additional perspectives on the meeting:

http://researchscorecard.com/blog/archives/262

http://leverageinnovation.com/wordpress/?p=14

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.

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!

CDD has joined the fray of Web 2.0 on-the-go!

Last week, Barry Bunin, PhD (our CDD CEO) gave a presentation at the Bio-IT conference in Boston. Les Jordan of the Microsoft Life Sciences division, while sitting in the audience, posted a tweet about Barry’s talk, even providing a link to our website.

With the Twitter craze in full force, it’s great to see CDD getting exposure.  Hopefully we continue to inspire more tweets!

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!