Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) Announces Customer Advisory Board (CAB) Members

BURLINGAME, Calif. — May 27, 2014 — Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) is delighted to announce the members of our commercial Customer Advisory Board (CAB). The following industry thought leaders were carefully selected to help guide the short-term and long-term development of the CDD Vault platform:

• Jeff Blaney, Director Computational Chemistry & Chemoinformatics (Genentech)
• Henry Johnson, Senior Scientist (Amgen, Onyx Pharmaceuticals subsidiary)
• Thale Jarvis, VP Research & Development (Crestone Pharmaceuticals)
• Mark Gurney, CEO (Tetra Discovery Partners)
• Paul Humphries, VP Chemical Sciences (Reset Therapuetics)
• Daniel Erlanson, President (Carmot Therapeutics)

As reported at the 10 Year Anniversary CDD User & Community Meeting, CDD Vault has the same number of user logins/month as a full year in 2008.

CDD’s Product Manager, Kellan Gregory, commented, "A constantly expanding customer base has an interesting impact on CDD Vault. The metrics observed become more actionable. We're able to clearly identify areas of the application where we'd like to expand the current capabilities. One challenge that arises with a growing number of users is supporting broader use cases while still maintaining the simplicity and usability inherent in the core CDD Vault design aesthetic."

Having thought leaders particularly with a commercial bent ensures CDD Vault co-evolves to meet the needs of scientists and thus (albeit indirectly via the transitive property) of human health. This sentiment was eloquently captured in the recent spotlight interview when CDD Customer Advisory Board Member Dr. Paul Humphries mentioned, “CDD is as collaborative as its software! I am constantly being asked for feedback and potential new features that I’d like to see added (both short and long term). I like the ability to view dose response curves within SAR tables. I like the ability to be able to segregate projects and share data with different parties for different projects. I like how user friendly, and customizable it is, meaning scientists can spend time doing science and not uploading/curating data. I like the fact that there are multiple updates happening on a regular basis rather than waiting long periods of time for these large updates. Barry, Kellan, Sylvia, and Anna have been tremendous customer-facing employees that constantly fix problems and offer solutions in a professional and efficient manner. They understand our business and understand that time is of the essence for us to be able to bring novel therapies to patients that are desperately in need of help.”

The CAB complements the existing Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). The SAB includes Christopher Lipinski, James McKerrow, Adam Renslo, David Roos, Wes Van Voorhis, and Jim Wikel.

“The Customer Advisory Board intentionally includes leading biologists and chemists, individuals with deep drug discovery and deep informatics expertise, and runs the gamut from the largest biotech to smaller startups,” said Dr. Barry Bunin, CEO of CDD, “Our SAB has a heavy neglected disease emphasis where our heart always lies. Our CAB emphasizes and reinforces that CDD Vault has crossed the chasm as the workhorse tool for many leaders of cutthroat, highly competitive commercial drug discovery.”

“On the research side we are constantly exploring and recombining ideas in CDD’s unique collaborative manner,” explained CDD Collaborations Director, Dr. Nadia Litterman, “our customer advisory board, scientific advisory board, and extensive customer base are not only great resources like one would typically expect, but given our particularly collaborative business model, they actually are true partners. Promising research projects require new tools that become increasingly useful software modules in CDD Vault…and of course our partners always own 100% of the drug IP.”

The CAB Bios and Photos can be found on the Leadership page: https://www.collaborativedrug.com/leadership/.

About Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.

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.

Media Contacts: Barry Bunin, PhD, Collaborative Drug Discovery, (650) 204-3084, info@collaborativedrug.com