Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) is in a unique position for drug discovery grants because of the CDD business model precluding ownership of Drug Discovery IP, as well as the complementary chemoinformatics and collaborative web-software capabilities. In this $1M phase 2 STTR example pairing “bioinformatics Pathway Logic (biocyc) and TB screening capabilities” from SRI International with “chemoinformatics, collaborative software, and services” from CDD shows how the organizations combined capabilities achieve results that would be impossible working in isolation.
In this case, in phase 1, SRI International using the Pathway Logic technology, identified putative novel tuberculosis targets for drug discovery. Then CDD identified compounds similar to the known metabolites and inhibitors of those targets and provided the collaborative platform to streamline computational and experimental workflows and communication. Finally SRI International tested the hypotheses and identified novel tuberculosis inhibitors in whole cell phenotypic screens in the BSL laboratory.
Traditionally, researchers have thought of CDD and collaborative capabilities as limited to or focused on data. And the data is part of the foundation for thriving collaborations. But as this example clearly demonstrated, collaboration can and is about both ideas and data (hypotheses and experiments). Ultimately, effective collaboration provides leverage, innovation, and efficiency.
Because of the heterogeneity of biological therapeutic areas, targets, hypotheses, and screens, together with the increasing importance of informatics and collaboration, the door is now open for numerous collaborative projects. Each project is completely novel, different, and specific for each collaboration. However, at a meta level they are all the same - the collaborator owns the drug IP and CDD supports innovative project while advancing our informatics, software capabilities. You own all the drug discovery "gold", we improve the tools.
Directly contact CDD CEO Barry Bunin, Ph.D. (info[at]collaborativedrug[dot]com) for ideas on projects that could benefit from a collaborative, data driven approach to take “good ideas to great”.
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!