Burlingame, California — August 27, 2019 — Collaborative Drug Discovery, provider of the CDD Vault web-based drug discovery informatics platform, announced they won a competitive, peer-reviewed Phase 1 SBIR grant from NIH NCATS on Cloud Workspaces for Drug Discovery, titled: “A Robust, Secure Framework to Effortlessly Bind Distributed Databases and Analysis Tools into Tightly Integrated Translational Drug Discovery Computational Platforms”.
Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. (CDD) proposes to develop Cloud Workspaces for Drug Discovery – a novel informatics framework that will enable scientists engaged in drug discovery and translation to effortlessly, robustly, and securely integrate disparate databases and computational tools distributed across multiple systems and vendors into highly-efficient, custom-tailored computational platforms. Our innovative technology will solve a critical problem that hinders drug discovery and translation efforts: scientists in this field typically need to combine chemical and biological data from several sources, run them through multiple software packages that specialize in different types of analyses and visualization, then ideally store the results of the analyses together with their underlying experimental data. Today, this type of integration is difficult and expensive to accomplish and typically fragile, creating a large barrier to (i) exploiting the rapidly increasing number of high-quality, public-access data repositories and (ii) evaluating promising new analytical tools and strategies.
Cloud Workspaces (CW) will, in essence, allow users to easily create their own individualized cloud-hosted solutions tailored to their unique requirements and workflows. Our approach offers the performance, robustness, and ease of use of a monolithic software solution, but without the associated inflexibility and vendor lock-in. It offers the flexibility and openness of combining discrete resources, but without the associated integration challenges and fragility, and it advances the pipelining approach to embrace cloud-based models and to encompass distributed data resources without compromising performance or security.
CW will enable scientists to exploit the burgeoning array of public data repositories and sophisticated new computational algorithms and apply them in practice to drug discovery and translation projects. By eliminating the challenges of installing, configuring, and maintaining software, CW will allow scientists to quickly explore and adapt new methodologies. Conversely, the technology will support new marketing channels and business models for software vendors, enabling faster and broader adoption of advanced techniques. We have already lined up several prominent software providers that wish to participate.
The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) is part of a program to enable sharing of biological data. Award Number #1R43TR002527-01 from National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences as described on NIH Reporter supports this project. This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences or the National Institutes of Health.
CDD’s (www.collaborativedrug.com) flagship product, “CDD Vault®”, is used to manage chemical registration, structure-activity relationships (SAR), and securely scale collaborations. CDD Vault® is a hosted database solution for secure management and sharing of biological and chemical data. It lets you intuitively organize chemical structures and biological study data, and collaborate with internal or external partners through an easy to use web interface. Available modules within CDD Vault include Activity & Registration, Visualization, Inventory, and ELN.
A complete list of more than 60 publications and patents from CDD can be found online on our resources page at https://www.collaborativedrug.com/publications-and-resources/.
Media Contact: Barry Bunin, Ph.D., Collaborative Drug Discovery, marketing@collaborativedrug.com.