Archive for the ‘Press’ Category

3rd Annual Collaborative Drug Discovery – UCSF Community Meeting for Catalyzing Humanitarian and Commercial Research to be Held October 1st

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire/ — The Gladstone Center for Translational Research and the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) together with Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. (CDD) are pleased to announce the prestigious speakers and panelists that will present at the 3rd Annual Collaborative Drug Discovery – UCSF Community Meeting for Catalyzing Humanitarian and Commercial Research. The meeting is on October 1st, 2009 from 8:30 am – 6:30 pm on the first floor Gladstone Institute Auditorium at the UCSF, Mission Bay Campus (San Francisco, CA, USA) and it is free and open to the general public (see below for registration instructions).

Confirmed speakers and panelists include:

  • Christopher Lipinski, PhD, Melior Discovery, 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
  • Takushi Kaneko, PhD, Senior Project Leader, Chemistry, TB Alliance
  • Andrea Altieri, PhD, Manager, Marketing & Project Development, ASINEX
  • Biotech Panel: Bard Geesaman (PharmSelex), Ellen Berg (Bioseek), Marc Navre (Ardelyx), Christopher Silvia (Icagen)

Following in the footsteps of our previous two community meetings, we expect this will be an informative, scientifically focused meeting with the opportunity to informally interact with biomedical research scientists from across a wide range of therapeutic areas and specialties including neglected infectious disease research and leading commercial research of interest to biotech and pharmaceutical companies.

There will be two round table panel discussions, one focused on biotech research and a second that brings together academics, pharma industry, non-profit and NIH researchers to discuss topics related to drug discovery and fostering collaboration between research groups. We will also have a poster session for attendees to present their work and several networking opportunities including a post meeting reception.

Dr. Sean Ekins (CDD Collaborations Director), who will be chairing the biotech panel, mentioned, “It is unusual to have thought leaders like these coming together, especially at a free, open symposium for the general public. With posters and networking sessions, this provides a unique forum for scientists interested in commercial and humanitarian drug discovery R&D. We encourage scientists and drug discovery business leaders to attend, interact and find out about the research being done by our keynote speakers, while at the same time learning about how the CDD platform can help scientists archive, mine and collaborate around their data.” CDD scientists will also present their research, provide training, software vision and a development roadmap for the CDD database.

“CDD will showcase new capabilities to the public for the first time, including the secure CDD Vault™ for handling sensitive, private data, CDD Collaborate™ for private-to-private collaborations with new selective projects views, and CDD Public™ which is a constantly growing and more useful set of public data to complement folks private R&D,” Barry Bunin, PhD (CDD President) said. “Each year the community meeting gets bigger and more exciting as CDD’s extended community grows, so please join us to help make this the best meeting yet. Given it is a community based platform, it is more about the scientists involved and we are here to facilitate and help.”

The 3rd Annual community meeting is free thanks to sponsorship from ASINEX, additional sponsorship opportunities are still available for a limited number of partners (contact info@collaborativedrug.com).

Self-register for free at the following URL: https://www.acteva.com/go/cdd

To present a poster email the poster title and abstract to info@collaborativedrug.com

About Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.
Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. (CDD) provides web-based software platform that organizes preclinical research data to help scientists advance new drug candidates more effectively. The CDD database enables scientists to “archive, mine, and collaborate”® around preclinical chemical and biological drug discovery data through a web-based interface. The platform is composed of 3 components, CDD Vault™ for securely storing and handling sensitive, private data, CDD Collaborate™ for enabling secure private-to-private collaborations with new selective projects views, and CDD Public™ which is a set of growing public datasets from the scientific community. The software can be used for example to help distributed research groups to safely store and intelligently analyze small molecule, enzyme, cell and animal bioactivity data accumulated from both low-throughput and high-throughput screens. Scientists can choose which datasets to keep completely private and which datasets, if any, to share securely with selected colleagues. Unique collaboration features and CDD’s community-oriented approach help unite globally dispersed humanitarian efforts against neglected infectious diseases. Similar collaborative strategies are also rapidly gaining prominence in the commercial arena. CDD offers its industrial-strength database software at a price affordable to academic laboratories, research foundations, and small companies. For more information, visit http://www.collaborativedrug.com.

CONTACT: Barry Bunin, Ph.D., President & CEO of Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD), Inc., +1-650-204-3084, info@collaborativedrug.com

CDD Surpasses One Million Compounds Hosted in Constantly Growing Collaborative SAR Database

Friday, April 17th, 2009

Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. (CDD) is proud to announce that CDD’s Web 2.0 collaborative research information system now hosts over 1 million structure searchable compounds. The accelerated adoption of CDD by academic, non-profit and corporate customers for securely storing focused chemical and biological research data validates CDD’s new paradigm in online research information management.

“The 1 millionth structure is a key milestone for CDD, the culmination of large compound contributions from several customers, including the University of Texas Austin Screening Center,” said Dr. Barry Bunin, CEO and President of Collaborative Drug Discovery. “More importantly, it demonstrates that CDD capabilities and performance scales – searches are very rapid, a substructure search of even a molecule as common as (-) Epinephrine will generate all the hits in just seconds.”

“It has been great to work with the CDD database and wonderful customer support team,” said Dr. Eun Jeong Cho at the TI3D Screening at the University of Texas Austin. “We are impressed with the CDD system which is accurate, fast, and identified data inconsistencies that we might not have seen in our quality control reports.”

Notes Sean Ekins, PhD, CDD Collaborations Director, “The 1 millionth structure, (4-chlorophenyl) N-benzylcarbamate, is from Maybridge’s HitFinder screening compound library which is part of the University of Texas TI3D Screening Center’s private CDD data set. CDD allows secure searching of both private data and the CDD Public Access data. Searching the CDD public data shows this Maybridge compound is 68% similar to rivastigmine which is used to treat Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. In addition to the maximum dosing information for rivastigmine in the CDD public data, integrated linking to ChemSpider finds further useful properties and references.”

CDD’s hosted compounds include several publicly available data sources with chemical and biological data for 140,000 chemical structures only available via CDD, including:

  • 47,000 Ki values for 20,000 compounds against 699 GPCR targets from the NIMH Psychoactive Drug Screening Program at the University of North Carolina
  • 48,818 compounds from the Distributed Drug Discovery (D3) at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
  • Unique compounds from ASINEX’s Synergy, Focused & Building Blocks Libraries
  • TimTec’s databases of Natural Products and Derivatives
  • Over 15,000 compounds with Malaria assay data from 5 public data sources
  • Almost 7,500 compounds with Tuberculosis antibacterial and cell viability information from 4 public data sets and growing thanks to our collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Plus much more…

About Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.
Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. (CDD) – http://www.collaborativedrug.com – provides web-based software that organizes preclinical research data to help scientists advance new drug candidates more effectively. The CDD database enables scientists to “archive, mine, and collaborate”® around preclinical chemical and biological drug discovery data through a web-based interface. The software helps distributed research groups to safely store and intelligently analyze small molecule, enzyme, cell and animal bioactivity data accumulated from both low-throughput and high-throughput screens. Unique collaboration features and CDD’s community-oriented approach help unite globally dispersed humanitarian efforts against neglected infectious diseases. Similar collaborative strategies are also rapidly gaining prominence in the commercial arena. CDD offers its industrial-strength database software at a price affordable to academic laboratories, research foundations, and small companies.

For further information please contact:

Barry Bunin, PhD
President & CEO
Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD)
1818 Gilbreth Road, Suite 220
Burlingame, CA 94010
Phone: 650-204-3084
info@collaborativedrug.com

CDD’s Tuberculosis Effort Covered by BioInform and Drug Discovery News

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Two articles were recently published covering CDD’s new effort for the tuberculosis research community and our collaboration with TBDB. To read more, see Bioinform’s article, “Collaborative Drug Discovery to Use Gates Foundation Grant for Tuberculosis Database”, and the article in Drug Discovery News, “Tuberculosis portal”.

Important note regarding BioInform: Reading the BioInform article once straight through is free. If you visit the article again or hit the back button, you must have a subscription to access the text.

Collaborative Drug Discovery Receives Gates Foundation Grant to Support the Development of a Database to Accelerate Discovery of New Therapies Against Tuberculosis

Monday, November 17th, 2008

Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. (CDD) today announced that it has received a grant for $1,896,923 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a collaborative database that will enable scientists to archive, mine, and selectively collaborate around their research data to discover new cures for tuberculosis (TB). The TB bacillus infects approximately one third of the world’s population and the disease kills over 1.5 million people every year. The CDD TB database will integrate the efforts of academic, other non-profit, and corporate laboratories distributed across the globe and accelerate the discovery of new therapies against this deadly disease.

CDD also announced that it has hired Sean Ekins, PhD, as Director of Collaborations for the project. “The neglected disease research community needs new ways to integrate disjointed drug discovery efforts so that dispersed labs can form efficient virtual pharmaceutical organizations,” said Dr. Ekins. “This project will spark collaborative efforts to discover more effective drugs against TB that are less expensive and easier to administer.”

“This grant promotes our goal of developing more effective medicines for those in developing countries who need them most,” said Ken Duncan, Senior Program Officer at the Gates Foundation. “CDD’s technology will help the entire TB research community to collaborate more easily. We hope it will speed the scientific breakthroughs urgently needed to make effective therapies more accessible to the world’s poorest people, and confront the challenges of multidrug- and extensively drug-resistant TB strains.”

The two-year project will initially involve eight academic research groups and later expand to include other participants. “CDD has already established its software platform as an indispensable tool for many scientists studying neglected infectious diseases including TB,” said Professor Carl Nathan, MD, Chairman, Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. “This grant from the Gates Foundation will encourage many more researchers to participate in the CDD community.”

“We are thrilled that the Gates Foundation is supporting this project,” said Barry Bunin, PhD, CEO & President of CDD. “Early on, CDD decided to focus on supporting humanitarian as well as commercial drug discovery. This grant validates that decision and provides a model for CDD to work with industry and other foundations targeting additional specific diseases.”

CDD is currently working with the Myelin Repair Foundation (MRF), which has pioneered a research paradigm that organizes diverse academic groups into highly-structured collaborations with a sharp focus on outcomes. “We are delighted to see more organizations and researchers endorse the emerging collaborative model for drug discovery,” said Scott Johnson, President and Founder of the Myelin Repair Foundation (MRF). The MRF and CDD recently partnered to customize CDD’s tools as part of a proof-of concept program to organize data from the MRF’s highly-structured myelin repair scientific collaboration.

About Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.

Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. (CDD) provides web-based software that organizes preclinical research data to help scientists advance new drug candidates more effectively. The CDD database enables scientists to “archive, mine, and collaborate”® around preclinical chemical and biological drug discovery data through a web-based interface. The software helps distributed research groups to safely store and intelligently analyze small molecule, enzyme, cell and animal bioactivity data accumulated from both low-throughput and high-throughput screens. Scientists can choose which datasets to keep completely private and which datasets, if any, to share securely with selected colleagues. Unique collaboration features and CDD’s community-oriented approach help unite globally dispersed humanitarian efforts against neglected infectious diseases. Similar collaborative strategies are also rapidly gaining prominence in the commercial arena. CDD offers its industrial-strength database software at a price affordable to academic laboratories, research foundations, and small companies. For more information, visit http://www.collaborativedrug.com.

For further information please contact:

Barry Bunin, Ph.D.
President & CEO
Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD), Inc.
1818 Gilbreth Road, Suite 220
Burlingame, CA 94010
650-204-3084
info@collaborativedrug.com

TimTec and Collaborative Drug Discovery Team Up to Provide Chemically Searchable Natural Products and Derivatives Available to the Scientific Community

Friday, October 17th, 2008

TimTec LLC., the international distributor of synthetic organic and natural compounds, and Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. (CDD), the community based research information management enterprise, announced today that the CDD web-based software now hosts TimTec’s Natural Product Library and Natural Derivatives Library. The TimTec natural product and derivative compounds are now available as a structure searchable database in the CDD Web2.0 collaborative research information system.

(more…)

The NIMH Psychoactive Drug Screening Program and Collaborative Drug Discovery Provide a Chemically Searchable GPCR Structure-Activity Relationship Database to the Entire Drug Discovery Community

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. (CDD), in partnership with the NIMH Psychoactive Drug Screening Program (PDSP) directed by Dr. Bryan L. Roth at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, announced today that CDD’s web-based software now hosts the largest open-access chemical sub-structure and similarity searchable G-Protein Coupled Receptor (GPCR) Ki database. The PDSP Ki database of 47,312 inhibitor equilibrium dissociation constants (Ki values) for 699 receptor targets is now available as a structure searchable database in the CDD Web 2.0 collaborative research information system.

The PDSP Ki database is a unique resource in the public domain which provides information on the abilities of drugs to interact with an expanding number of molecular targets. The Ki database serves as a data warehouse for published and internally-derived Ki, or affinity, values for a large number of drugs and drug candidates at a growing number of G-protein coupled receptors, ion channels, transporters and enzymes.

“The PDSP Ki database web site, hosted by the University of North Carolina Medical Center, received about 1 million hits in the last year,” said Dr. Bryan Roth, PDSP Project Director and Professor of Pharmacology. This data is now available with chemical structure searching in the CDD system for everyone to view. Adds Dr. Roth, “The CDD Database is an extremely elegant platform. I highly recommend it for anyone generating drug discovery data.”

“It is a privilege to work with Dr. Bryan Roth to provide open access to the PDSP Ki data via the CDD platform,” said Dr. Barry Bunin, President of Collaborative Drug Discovery. “CDD provides the PDSP Ki data in a traditional structure/SAR mineable database combined with novel-to-the-world secure, collaborative public and private data integration capabilities. With ~40% of all small molecule drugs acting on GPCR targets, this will help the research community develop new drugs and better predict potential drug off target related side effects and likely drug-drug interferences.”

The PDSP Ki database joins 12 other publicly available data sources in the CDD system with chemical and biological data for over 40,000 compounds including:

  • 1,700 FDA approved drugs with indications and sponsors
  • Over 15,000 compounds with Malaria assay data from 5 public data sources
  • More than 850 compounds with Tuberculosis antibacterial activity information
  • A data set of almost 3,500 Natural Products and Derivatives
  • 25,000+ compounds available for purchase

About the NIMH Psychoactive Drug Screening Program

The NIMH Psychoactive Drug Screening Program (PDSP) – http://pdsp.med.unc.edu – provides screening of novel psychoactive compounds for pharmacological and functional activity at cloned human or rodent CNS receptors, channels, and transporters as a contractor to National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Screening of compounds is provided to qualified academic investigators at no cost using assays for a large number of cloned human or rodent cDNAs for CNS receptors, channels and transporters, as well as functional assays to determine effects on second messenger systems, channel activity and transporter function. Ki values are calculated and registered to the PDSP database. Cloned receptors are also available at no cost to qualified investigators. For a list of current receptors/transporters go to http://pdsp.med.unc.edu/pdspw/clones.php.

For further information please contact:

Barry Bunin, PhD
President & CEO
Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD)
1818 Gilbreth Road, Suite 220
Burlingame, CA 94010
Phone: 650-204-3084
info@collaborativedrug.com

Bryan Roth, M.D., Ph.D.
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Department of Pharmacology School of Medicine
CB 7365, 8032 Burnett-Womack Building
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
Phone: 919-966-7535
Fax: 919-843-5788
bryan_roth@med.unc.edu

InnoCentive and CDD partner to offer InnoCentive Solvers free access to CDD’s software

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

The partnership provides InnoCentive Solvers with software needed to analyze and develop more effective solutions to scientific Challenges. For more details, please download the press release (PDF).

Collaborative Drug Discovery and Myelin Repair Foundation Announce Partnership

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. (CDD) announced today that its web-based software, which organizes preclinical research data to help scientists advance new drug candidates, has been selected by the Myelin Repair Foundation (MRF) to enable the foundation’s sponsored researchers to collaborate more effectively.

MRF’s Accelerated Research Collaboration™ (ARC™) model creates a unique partnership between academic researchers, scientific and drug discovery advisors and a centralized management team to define and execute on an integrated research plan that will reduce the time to market for a wide range of patient treatments. Focused exclusively at this time on identifying myelin repair drug targets that will lead to treatments for multiple sclerosis by 2009, MRF provides the business infrastructure for a team of some 30 scientists, working together virtually, from different university laboratories in the U.S. By following best business practices, working on a common research plan, sharing their findings in real time, and piggybacking experiments that might otherwise have taken years to accomplish, the scientists have been able to considerably accelerate their research.

CDD enables scientists to collaborate easily across institutional and disciplinary boundaries and empowers new cooperative research strategies, such as MRF’s innovative ARC model. The database features the ability to share data with a spectrum of permissions—either selectively with just a few specific colleagues, openly with the entire scientific community, or not at all. This flexibility encourages data sharing where appropriate while protecting intellectual property, so promising approaches can be patented and commercialized.

The software excels at capturing and organizing fragmented data that would otherwise remain dispersed across multiple laboratories. Foundations can easily set-up and manage collaborations involving multiple research groups located anywhere in the world and spanning multiple scientific disciplines. The central database maintains research continuity as participants change and ensures continued access to the results of sponsored research. CDD manages all the infrastructure and presents data to researchers through an intuitive web interface; contextually-aware hyperlinks steer scientists where they need to go without requiring them to master complex tools.

“By working together with CDD, we can fully exploit the value of the preclinical research data generated by our sponsored researchers and advance promising new therapies for multiple sclerosis more rapidly into clinical trials,” said MRF Chief Operating Officer Rusty Bromley. “CDD’s software perfectly complements MRF’s Accelerated Research Collaboration model which relies on multiple groups located throughout the country, each focusing on different aspects of the overall research challenge. Each group contributes different types of data to the collaboration depending on its distinct scientific specialty. CDD’s software integrates these efforts, so a virtual network of academic laboratories can drive toward developing new therapies with a degree of focus historically unavailable in academic laboratories.”

In addition to making its existing capabilities available to all MRF researchers, CDD will extend the software’s range to include target validation and customize the interface for MRF’s researchers. “We are delighted to enter into this partnership with MRF,” said CDD Founder and President Barry Bunin. “MRF has pioneered a research paradigm that organizes diverse academic groups into highly-structured collaborations with a sharp focus on outcomes. CDD’s software was designed specifically to encourage and support this type of research model, so we believe our database will significantly accelerate MRF’s efforts.”

MRF and CDD will also work together to help other disease research organizations realize the full potential of collaborative research. “While MRF is specifically focused on speeding myelin repair discoveries that will lead to treatments for multiple sclerosis, we believe that our ARC model has implications for research more broadly,” said Bromley. “Part of our mission is to enable others to reap the benefits of the ARC model for preclinical drug discovery R&D. A successful partnership with CDD will offer proof of concept to others seeking collaboration tools for similar research efforts.”

Also see other reports about CDD’s partnership with the MRF:

  1. Biotech Transfer Week – “Myelin Repair Foundation Taps CDD Software To Support ‘Accelerated’ Academic Research”
  2. Drug Discovery News – “One platform for MS research”

About Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.
Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. (CDD) – http://www.collaborativedrug.com – provides web-based software that organizes preclinical research data to help scientists advance new drug candidates more effectively. The CDD database enables scientists to “archive, mine, and collaborate”® around preclinical chemical and biological drug discovery data through a web-based interface. The software helps distributed research groups to safely store and intelligently analyze small molecule, enzyme, cell and animal bioactivity data accumulated from both low-throughput and high-throughput screens. Unique collaboration features and CDD’s community-oriented approach help unite globally dispersed humanitarian efforts against neglected infectious diseases. Similar collaborative strategies are also rapidly gaining prominence in the commercial arena. CDD offers its industrial-strength database software at a price affordable to academic laboratories, research foundations, and small companies.

About the Myelin Repair Foundation
The Myelin Repair Foundation (MRF) – http://www.myelinrepair.org – is a Northern California-based, not-for-profit research foundation created to provide a collaborative environment in which leading research scientists at multiple universities, and experienced business executives, can work together to execute a five-year research plan – with milestones, parallel experiments, collaboration, and, most important, a constant focus on developing effective treatments for multiple sclerosis. Many believe MRF’s Accelerated Research Collaboration model could change the way in which all medical research is conducted.

About Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Myelin Repair
MS is a degenerative disease of the central nervous system that affects more than 2.5 million people worldwide. The destruction of myelin, the protective coating surrounding the nerve fibers of the brain and spinal cord, and the body’s inability to repair it, results in various types of disabilities including motor, sensory, cognitive and vision. By combining their research efforts, MRF scientists expect to develop viable treatment targets that restore the body’s natural ability to repair myelin, reversing the effects of MS.

Drug Discovery News Article on CDD

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

Drug Discovery news has published an article on CDD’s work with the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. From the article:

A collaboration to identify and develop drugs for resistant strains of malaria draws on an unusual combination of resources: U.S. Army research from 1946 plus 21st century informatics and lab technology.

The joint work on malaria began about two years ago between Collaborative Drug Discovery Inc., (CDD) and the Department of Chemical Biology and Therapeutics at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. CDD created a database of over 12,000 molecules from the 61-year-old, two-volume “A Survey of Malaria Drugs,” edited by Frederick Y. Wiselogle.

Read the entire article here.

Army Malaria Data Released to the CDD Community

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. (CDD, Inc.) and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have joined together for a project aimed at speeding the development of new drugs to overcome resistant strains of malaria.

The collaboration combines the malaria drug data and informatics technology of CDD with the drug discovery expertise of the St. Jude Department of Chemical Biology and Therapeutics. Informatics is the use of computer hardware and software to extract and manage knowledge from large databases.

“CDD’s databases will probably help us reduce the number of potential molecules we’ll need to analyze from tens of millions down to hundreds of thousands,” said Kip Guy, Ph.D., chair of the St. Jude Department of Chemical Biology and Therapeutics. “Our own screening capability will significantly reduce that to a much smaller number of promising compounds.
This will be a widely used database. We are already making the data freely available through CDD so that other researchers can use different analytical strategies to identify potential new anti-malarial drugs.”

The collaboration is designed to help scientists quickly screen millions of chemicals, based on their structure and their chemical and biological properties, to find those that are most likely to make effective anti-malaria drugs. The key to this quest to find the drug “needle in the haystack” is the enormous two-volume collection of data from studies on malarial drugs published by the U.S. Army in 1946.

This 61-year-old publication, “A Survey of Malaria Drugs,” was originally edited by Frederick Y. Wiselogle and had contributions from a number of leading researchers of the time. The two-volume set was designed to help researchers develop effective anti-malarial drugs; and to serve as a model for how scientists could develop drugs for other infections,
according to the authors of that publication. The collection presents the structures of many compounds and the results of studies on their biochemical activity in animals, data on how they work in the body, how long they last, and other pharmacological data, in addition to their level of toxicity. The results of the animal studies represent one of the largest sets of published data on the structure-activity relationship (SAR) of molecules against a single disease, Guy said. SAR refers to the link between a molecule’s specific structure and the biological effect it has because of that structure.

CDD scanned the information from the original publication into a computer database and organized it into a format that can be read, searched and shared. This more convenient format will enable St. Jude scientists to use the information to develop models of new anti-malaria drugs and predict their efficacy, toxicity, and how the body will respond to them.

Based on such models, St. Jude researchers are conducting a comprehensive analysis of “relevant chemical space” of these molecules, something that has never before been done for malarial drug research, Guy said. Relevant chemical space refers to the study of individual families of molecules whose members all share a similar structure that holds promise for a
specific therapeutic use. Concentrating on only certain families of molecules likely to have the desired effect saves time and speeds the discovery of the few molecules most likely to have all the characteristics needed for an effective anti-malaria drug, he said.

The anti-malarial drug study is the first of several planned by CDD to help the research community discover drugs for orphan infectious diseases—disorders for which there is little commercial interest in developing drugs. Future CDD communities are planned in other more commercial areas, such as cancer research and selected gene families.

To access this historical set of Malaria Animal SAR data for the first time, either visit http://www.collaborativedrug.com/register or e-mail info@collaborativedrug.com for the username and password to the open data sets.

About Collaborative Drug Discovery: CDD is the world’s first platform for selectively sharing collaborative drug discovery data. Scientists working with the CDD community platform can pool their research in order to more effectively develop new drug candidates for commercial and humanitarian markets. Conceived in 2003, and formally launched in 2004,
Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) has been serving the collaborative data needs of researchers for years. The CDD global community includes hundreds of scientists from leading research foundations, academia and industry. A subset of the data is available openly to the public at no cost.

About St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is internationally recognized for its pioneering work in finding cures and saving children with cancer and other catastrophic diseases. Founded by late entertainer Danny Thomas and based in Memphis, Tenn., St. Jude freely shares its discoveries with scientific and medical communities around the world. No family ever pays for treatments not covered by insurance, and families without insurance are never asked to pay. St. Jude is
financially supported by ALSAC, its fundraising organization. For more information, please visit www.stjude.org.