GSK and Online Communities Create Unique Alliance to Stimulate Open Source Drug Discovery for Malaria

- GSK becomes first company to freely share chemical structures on 13,500 molecules from its compound library
- Alliances formed with leading scientific research communities from private industry and public-domain data provider

May 19, 2010/Burlingame, CA/ GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) had teamed up with leading public-domain data providers European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the US-based informatics service provider Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) to make freely available key scientific information on more than 13,500 compounds that could ultimately lead to new treatments for malaria.  

The release of this data marks the first time that a pharmaceutical company has made available the structures of so many compounds and is made possible through the collaboration of the web hosts and their specialist research tools, which will be available at no cost to researchers. The information, which is hosted on websites regularly used by researchers, includes high quality scientific data about the molecules from GSK’s own compound library which have demonstrated potency against the most deadly malaria parasite, P. falciparum.  

“We are delighted that EMBL-EBI, NLM and CDD have joined us in this worthwhile endeavour to apply the principles of open source to drug discovery for malaria,” said Patrick Vallance, head of drug discovery at GSK. “Defeating this disease will require many scientific minds working together. We hope researchers from across the world will now use this information to drive further studies, and that other groups from pharmaceutical industry to academia will add their information to this on-line resource.”  

This type of data is the first step on the road to developing new medicines. With the structure of the compounds and information about where they affect the malaria parasite, scientists could then carry out further research on these compounds for drug discovery or to understand how these might be used to inhibit the parasite’s life cycle and ultimately lead to new medicines. Opening up this information widely is essentially an example of ‘open source’ tactic being applied to drug discovery.  

“Making life-science information openly available to the research community is at the heart of the EMBL-EBI’s mission,” added John Overington, leader of the EMBL-EBI’s ChEMBL team, which will act as the primary repository for the data through its ChEMBL resource. “We’re proud to be able to add value to the GSK data by incorporating it into ChEMBL and linking it with a vast array of information that could help researchers to find new treatments for malaria. This is the beginning of a new era of public–private collaboration in drug research.” 

“NLM is excited to be involved in this groundbreaking release of information to the public,” said Steve Bryant, head of NLM’s PubChem database, which is housing the data. “By making these data available through public resources such as PubChem, GSK is greatly facilitating the research process, as the information is linked to related compounds, bioactivity results, published literature, and other resources that will assist researchers in making new discoveries to combat malaria.”   

“CDD is delighted to be playing a role in this truly historic event,” commented Barry A. Bunin, CEO of Collaborative Drug Discovery. “In decades of medical breakthroughs from Big Pharmas, this is the first time a group is openly sharing all the chemical and biological data – not just the few hits.  Furthermore, for phenotypic screens, the CDD tools allow researchers to begin to hypothesize and validate the targets from the whole cell screens.”  

EMBL-EBI will act as the primary repository for the data on this compound set, and will index and format further information that is contributed. GSK will add more information as it is generated and external scientists researching these compounds and the data will be asked do the same.  

About the data

The data contains the ‘hits’ or results from a screening of the 2 million compounds in GSK’s compound library to determine the effect of these compounds on the malaria parasite. The screening project identified ~13,500 compounds that showed strong inhibition on the parasite.

Kinase inhibitors constituted a large proportion of the molecules with previously known activity and now identified as antimalarial hits. The data includes the chemical families that GSK is currently researching for this indication and the ‘mechanisms of action’ for those compounds which the company has previously tested for other indications.

Most of the compound structures identified have been classified as capable of being converted into medicine.

The current microbiological information for the compounds and the structures have been put on online resources that are easily accessed by researchers. The EMBL-EBI site has been constructed so that scientists globally can add their data to the information there, with access free to all. The value of the release of information is enhanced by the collaboration of the web hosts and the specialist research tools on the site, that are being made available to researchers at no cost to them.

GSK gratefully recognises the support of Medicines for Malaria Venture, which contributed funding for this project.

Full information can be viewed online at:

www.ebi.ac.uk/chembl/

http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

www.collaborativedrug.com/ 

About malaria

Malaria is a life-threatening disease caused by parasites that are transmitted to people through the bites of infected mosquitoes. A child dies of malaria every 30 seconds. There were 243 million cases of malaria in 2009, causing nearly one million deaths, mostly among African children.  

The best available treatment for malaria – particularly the most deadly strain P. falciparum -  is a combination of drugs known as artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). However, parasite resistance is an issue and is undermining malaria control efforts. There are no effective alternatives to artemisinins for the treatment of malaria either on the market or nearing the end of the drug development process. 

About GlaxoSmithKline

GlaxoSmithKline –  one of the world’s leading research-based pharmaceutical and healthcare companies – is committed to improving the quality of human life by enabling people to do more, feel better and live longer.  For more information about GSK, visit www.gsk.com  

About the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and is located on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton near Cambridge (UK). The EMBL-EBI grew out of EMBL’s pioneering work in providing public biological databases to the research community. It hosts some of the world’s most important collections of biological data, including DNA sequences (ENA), protein sequences (UniProt), animal genomes (Ensembl), three-dimensional structures (the Protein Databank in Europe), data from gene expression experiments (ArrayExpress), protein-protein interactions (IntAct) and pathway information (Reactome). The EMBL-EBI hosts several research groups and its scientists continually develop new tools for the biocomputing community.  For more information about EMBL-EBI, visit www.ebi.ac.uk  

About the National Library of Medicine (NLM)

The National Library of Medicine (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/) is the world’s largest library of the health sciences. NLM is a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov. 

About Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD)

CDD hosts the most widely used drug discovery cloud platform on the market. “CDD Vault”  is the secure, private industrial-strength database combining traditional drug discovery informatics (registration and SAR) with social networking capabilities. “CDD Collaborate” enables real-time collaboration by securely exchanging selected confidential data with external researchers. “CDD Public” has unique content.  For more information about CDD, visitwww.collaborativedrug.com 

GSK  Press Contact:

UK: Janet Morgan      Tel:   + 44 (0) 20 8047 5502

US: Melinda Stubbee     Tel:  +1 919 483 2839 

EMBI-EBI Press Contact:

Katrina Pavelin       Tel:   +44 (0) 1223 494 452

EMBL-EBI Scientific Outreach Officer       Email: contactpress@ebi.ac.uk

NLM Press Contact:

Melanie Modlin       Tel: +1 301 496 7771

NLM Office of Communications and Public Liaison  Email: melanie.modlin@nih.gov 
 

CDD  Press Contact:

Barry Bunin, PhD      Tel:   +1 650 204 3084

President & CEO of Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc  Email:   info@collaborativedrug.com

BURLINGAME, Calif., April 1 /PRNewswire/ — Today, Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) brings Andrea Barry on board to spearhead an initiative to expand into the pharmaceuticals market, building on widespread acceptance of CDD’s platform among academic and biotech researchers.

Andrea Barry was the Director of North American Sales for SciTegic prior to its merger with Accelrys, Inc. Her team was responsible for 2/3 of the global revenue for the company.

“Andrea has proven herself to be a game-changer,” said Barry Bunin, CEO of CDD. “She brought significant growth to MDL, SciTegic and Accelrys – the powerhouses of traditional software tools in the commercial market – so we are confident that she will successfully translate our web-based collaborative approach to our growing number of large pharmaceutical customers.”

Bunin continues: “We’re as interested in Andrea’s ability to develop a community and to strengthen a revolutionary brand as in her skills as a revenue builder. We welcome her to the team and look forward to building new commercial relationships together.”

Andrea Barry commented, “It’s my privilege to join the CDD team at this exciting point in the company history. Great technology, a superior team of technical, scientific and business experts, and a culture that drives and thrives on collaboration: these are just a few of the important reasons I believe in CDD and where it’s headed.”

About the CDD platform (CDD Vault™, CDD Collaborate™, and CDD Public™):

The CDD platform contains a completely redesigned data import workflow with templates to streamline the data upload process. The rest of the site is organized more intuitively, with a separate section for each distinct major activity. Searching and browsing molecules and protocols are now performed in the “Explore Data” section of the application. The “Share Data” section makes collaboration (without sacrificing security) a breeze. The new Dashboard brings relevant information forward immediately upon login. Subsequent releases are planned on a regular basis incorporating feedback from the growing community. CDD supports alliances, crowd-sourcing, and custom applications.

About Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.:

CDD (www.collaborativedrug.com) provides the most widely used web-based drug discovery software platform on the market. “CDD Vault™” is the secure, private industrial-strength database combining traditional drug discovery informatics (registration and SAR) with social networking capabilities. “CDD Collaborate™” enables real-time collaboration by securely exchanging selected confidential data with external researchers. “CDD Public™” enables researchers to mine a unique aggregation of information from a variety of scientific data providers.

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

CDD is proud to announce the release of the third generation of their widely used web-based software platform, aptly dubbed “CDD3”. Anticipating the acceptance of cloud-based collaborative software as an industry standard, CDD has pioneered this field since its first generation software was released five years ago.

The new platform focuses on adding novel features as well as improving on previous releases. The first look at CDD3 was presented to the public in person by Kellan Gregory, Head of Community Interests at the 3rd Annual CDD – UCSF Community Meeting held October 1st (read about it here).

When asked what customers can expect from CDD in the future, Moses Hohman, Ph.D., VP of Development at CDD offered, “We are not resting on our laurels. We fully intend to build on our first-to-market advantage with CDD3 and will continue to innovate. We are excited about the year to come. You can count on CDD to bring you state-of-the-art technology for drug discovery years ahead of the rest of the market.”

When asked about current trends in the market, Barry Bunin, Ph.D., CEO of CDD commented, “Some people say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And yes, it does give us a small sense of validation when we hear in 2009 that many other companies are following our lead and providing hosted solutions for their drug discovery applications – but we knew we were doing the right thing all along. CDD was the first to offer hosted software for drug discovery 5 years ago. We’ve been in the cloud for the longest time in our space, so we have the experience with what really works. The market is embracing the paradigm because it is better value (bang-per-buck) for customers. It is only a matter of time until it becomes the dominant trend because it is fundamentally more economical.”

About the CDD3 platform (CDD Vault, CDD Collaborate, and CDD Public):
CDD3 contains a completely redesigned data import workflow with templates to streamline the data upload process. The rest of the site is organized more intuitively, with a separate section for each distinct major activity. Searching and browsing molecules and protocols, once in two separate sections, are now performed in the “Explore Data” section of the application. The “Share Data” section, intuitively named, makes collaboration (without sacrificing security) a breeze. The new Dashboard brings relevant information forward immediately upon login. The release has been live for one month, with subsequent releases planned on a regular basis incorporating feedback from the growing community. CDD supports alliances, crowd-sourcing, and custom applications.

About Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.:
CDD (www.collaborativedrug.com) hosts the most widely used drug discovery cloud platform on the market. “CDD Vault” is the secure, private industrial-strength database combining traditional drug discovery informatics (registration and SAR) with social networking capabilities. “CDD Collaborate” enables real-time collaboration by securely exchanging selected confidential data with external researchers. “CDD Public” has unique content.

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

Burlingame, California, August 31, 2009 — ChemBridge Corporation, a leading discovery chemistry company offering an extensive portfolio of discovery chemistry products and contract research services, has now made ten of their most popular screening libraries available to researchers via the Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) Public Access database. Now for the first time, researchers can access ChemBridge Libraries alongside a growing body of public data from leading vendors, researchers, scientific literature, and patent resources. CDD subscribers can access the data directly from their private groups, mining the libraries using their own private data to more effectively identify compounds of interest within the ChemBridge datasets, increasing the efficiency of identifying drug candidates. “The CDD database is an effective platform for biological and chemical data storage and mining, and knowing that a number of our client companies and research organizations are actively using the CDD database, we wanted to ensure that our clients could easily integrate ChemBridge screening library data into their workflow within the CDD database,” said Duncan Beniston, Executive Director Sales & Marketing, ChemBridge.

The libraries being offered include ChemBridge’s DIVERSet^TM, a 50,000 diverse small molecule dataset covering a broad range of pharmacophore space , CNS-Set^TM, containing 56,000 molecules with an increased probability of blood brain barrier penetration, as well as eight other libraries from ChemBridge’s impressive portfolio. In total, more than 600,000 ChemBridge molecules will be available through the CDD Database. “The CDD community for private access and the entire researcher community for public access both benefit when valuable new molecules and data are added to the database, such as the latest compounds available right off the shelf from ChemBridge,” says CDD CEO Barry Bunin, PhD, “and experimental and computational scientists with this new technology can view whole libraries and drill down to individual compounds from multiple data feeds. It is a new way of simultaneously interacting with lots of data from lots of collaborations.”

With the CDD database previously consisting of well over a million compounds, ChemBridge’s libraries join an impressive list of co-contributors. With the ongoing help of academic, non-profit, and industry contributors, CDD is continuously expanding the public database with both chemical and biological data. Collectively, these data sets and the software are being accessed by thousands of cutting edge researchers around the world. Anyone can register for free read-only access to these new and all public data sets on CDD’s website (www.collaborativedrug.com/register), read-and-write access (including the ability to archive, mine, and collaborate around private data and to import and export both private and public data) can be accessed following a free trial with full commercial access (contact: info@collaborativedrug.com). The compounds are available for testing hypotheses from ChemBridge (www.chembridge.com), additional molecules not in the public site can be ordered and the corresponding structures can also be archived in private sites and linked to biological activity data.

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 ChemBridge Corporation
ChemBridge Corporation, www.chembridge.com, is a leading global discovery chemistry company providing custom chemistry services, small molecule screening compound libraries and specialty building blocks for organic synthesis. ChemBridge is a San Diego based company with an impeccable 15 year track record of quality and deliverability and operates a state-of-the-art offshore discovery chemistry research site in Moscow, Russia. ChemBridge’s CRO business includes multi-year strategic alliances with major pharmaceutical companies as well as mid-size pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Over 500 pharmaceutical and biotech companies and universities worldwide have also taken advantage of ChemBridge’s portfolio of products, including its library of 10,000 specialty building blocks and 800,000 drug-like and lead-like small molecule screening compounds.

For further information please contact:

Barry Bunin, Ph.D.
President & CEO
Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD)
1633 Bayshore Hwy, Suite 342
Burlingame, CA 94010
info@collaborativedrug.com

Duncan Beniston
Executive Director, Sales & Marketing
ChemBridge Corporation
Phone: 1-858-451-7400
Email: duncan@chembridge.com

CDD updated our core database software today with the initial release of our collaboration technology and a number of security updates. Some of the highlights of the release:

• Community data, including the list of FDA approved drug structures, is now available to all users.
• Over 27 separate security enhancements to make sure that your data is more secure.
• New collaboration technology allows you to share data across all groups, if so desired.

To try out the application, please register now for a free trial account.

Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD, Inc) is pleased to announce the introduction of its next generation database technology. Collaborative Drug Discovery’s Web-based database enables scientists to collaborate in novel, global efforts to more effectively develop new drug candidates for commercial and humanitarian markets. The technology enables novel community-based research efforts that become more and more useful as additional participants contribute data. Publicly available data sets currently in the system include the FDA orphan and approved drugs and small molecule drug discovery data dating back over half a century. These data sets pertain to a diverse group of neglected diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis, African Sleeping Sickness, Chagas Disease and Leishmania.

Customers can also securely archive, mine, and collaborate around their small molecule preclinical drug discovery data in invitation-only, username-password protected groups.

The CDD Database is one of the easiest to use drug discovery informatics platforms available today. In designing the product, CDD has focused on making it easy enough for first year graduate students to use, yet powerful enough to satisfy the needs of experienced drug discovery scientists. In the July 2007 release of the Database, CDD has completely overhauled the user interface to make it easier to navigate and comprehend, has simplified the batch uploading of molecule and assay data, and has made the entire application more robust and secure.

Researchers can choose to keep their data private or share any or all of it with other research groups in the community. By default, labs using the CDD database only share their imported data privately with fellow lab members. A subset of the data is available openly to the public at no cost (please contact register@collaborativedrug.com for access).

Using the CDD technology, researchers can:

• Permanently archive their drug-centric data
• Mine chemical and biological data for lead optimization
• Access data instantaneously and securely
• Connect with multidisciplinary experts, yielding new insights
• Avoid duplication of research effort
• Optimize the use of valuable research resources
• Facilitate current and future collaborations
• Accelerate target validation and drug discovery
• Leverage a practical mechanism to maximize the benefit of collaborative data while minimizing intellectual property protection costs

For more information please visit: http://www.collaborativedrug.com/