World TB Day 2010 – A Call to Arms

Today marks World TB day 2010, 128 years to the day Dr. Robert Koch discovered the bacillus M. tuberculosis.

A recent WHO report indicated that approximately 1.8 M people died from TB in 2008, while multi-drug resistance was on the rise.  The Stop TB Partnership has set a goal to halve TB prevalence and deaths by 2015 (compared to 1990).

The Financial Times has posted a series of video interviews today on the subject of combating TB.

Early stage preclinical TB research continues as we have seen with the many groups CDD is currently supporting.

These are the biggest challenges we see for this research community:

1. Availability of funding for continued drug discovery screening initiatives.
2. Coordination of activities to prevent groups from covering the same ground (e.g. which compounds have been tested  under what conditions, etc.)
3. Drug discovery expertise to take a hit to a lead, and then to the clinic and keep the pipeline flowing.
4. Engagement of big pharma to help – Access to ADME/Tox models and tools to rapidly evaluate compound quality as early as possible in the pipeline.
5. Increase efficiency of drug discovery process using rational design and learn from data already produced.

We hope to see advances in these areas over the next year, and CDD is committed to help the TB and neglected disease community make it happen!

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