Assay Depot Partners with AstraZeneca to Launch Virtual Research Laboratory

Congratulations to Assay Depot and AstraZeneca

This press release came in yesterday and we thought that this is so exciting that we wanted to blog about it. Congratulations to both, Assay Depot and to AstraZeneca!

Why are we at CDD getting so excited about this particular news?  Because Virtual Research is the future and some companies are not just talking about it but actually doing something for real commercial projects like this one. Barry Bunin, our CEO, just recently blogged in 4 parts about this trend in “Virtual Pharma, Externalization, FIPnet, VIPCO – like gravity, you can fight it but you will lose”

It is exciting to see the new paradigm for which CDD originally (in 2004) was founded to become mainstream.  The CDD (“Collaborative Drug Discovery”) drug discovery software is tailored towards externalized drug discovery research projects. Some of our clients are entirely virtual from the get go, and others virtualize certain aspects of their operations over time.

What does that mean?

Economic pressures increasingly require pharma and Biotech companies to look outside their 4 walls for service providers and they outsource or “externalize” such services as running assays, synthesizing molecules, managing compound, managing drug discovery informatics, identifying drug lead candidates, optimizing drug leads and so on.

The key however is in the cloud- cloud technology enables us to work collaboratively.

Using “The Cloud” (completely web based services, software, data…) enables external partners to find each other (via a web based market place like Assay Depot) and to work with each other on their experimental data together and in real time (using for example the CDD Vault).  A common collaborative platform is the foundational requirement for a more economical collaborative model.   It allows diverse individuals and organizations to work well with everyone on the same page, which has been the traditional bottleneck for scaling collaborations.

Cloud based technology speeds research processes up enormously. It is “log in and go”.  It is not “wait until software is installed and someone tests it and rolls it out and a year later you can use it”.

The cloud also enables “work from anywhere” and “from any device with a browser”. And with that come broader adoption for new users – and new collaborative use cases, processes and workflows. Suddenly it is real fast, easy and also highly secure – to collaborate with partners around the world.  Now.

We are impressed by how fast AstraZeneca externalized and virtualized their drug discovery operations. We believe that this will give them a competitive edge. We congratulate Assay Depot for working with AstraZeneca, a truly large pharma company on such an important and groundbreaking project.

This blog is authored by members of the CDD Vault community. CDD Vault is a hosted drug discovery informatics platform that securely manages both private and external biological and chemical data. It provides core functionality including chemical registration, structure activity relationship, chemical inventory, and electronic lab notebook capabilities!

CDD Vault: Drug Discovery Informatics your whole project team will embrace!