April 19, 2024
Last week, the Collaborative Drug Discovery community gathered in South San Fransisco to mark a significant milestone: the 20th anniversary of CDD Vault. We extend our deepest gratitude to all the speakers, panelists, and attendees who made this event a resounding success.
A Heartfelt Thank You:
The User Group Meeting featured a stellar lineup of experts who shared their latest research and insights into the future of drug discovery. We extend our heartfelt thanks to all our presenters and panelists for their contributions. Our speakers and panelists included Beth Ponder, PhD, Samantha Stubblefield, PhD,Anjali Pandey, PhD, Jonathan Baell, PhD, Jeff Blaney, PhD, Walter Reiher, PhD, Wendy Young, PhD, and Peter Warner, DPhil. Their insights not only enriched our discussions but also inspired every participant.
We also want to extend a special thanks to Kellan Gregory, Charlie Weatherall, and Peter Gedeck, PhD from CDD for their presentations. Their expertise and insights into CDD's tools and future directions provided invaluable context and inspiration for all attendees.
Partners in Success:
Our heartfelt appreciation extends to our partners, Optibrium, Workflow Informatics Corp., and Torx® Software. Your ongoing support and contributions are integral to the continuous improvement and success of CDD Vault.
We Want to Hear from You:
Your input is invaluable as we continue to grow and evolve. Thank you to everyone who participated and contributed to the success of our 20th Anniversary User Group Meeting.
If you would like to discuss any of the topics presented further or have questions about future events, please feel free to reach out. Contact us at info@collaborativedrug.com to schedule a discussion or to learn more about upcoming opportunities.
Here's to many more years of innovation and collaboration! We hope to see you at our next User Group Meeting!
Speakers & Panelists
Beth Ponder, PhD
Executive Director, Sarafan ChEM-H and Innovative Medicines Accelerator (IMA), Stanford University
Elizabeth Ponder, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of Sarafan ChEM-H and the Innovative Medicines Accelerator (IMA) at Stanford University. She leads programs and operations of these organization to support the ambitious vision of improving human health through interdisciplinary research and translational of academic discoveries into new medicines. Dr. Ponder completed her Ph.D. and postdoctoral training at Stanford University in the laboratory of Dr. Matthew Bogyo. Her past work has included promoting public-private partnerships in the non-profit sector, managing multidisciplinary research in the higher education sector, and business development consulting in the for-profit biotech sector. Dr. Ponder joined Sarafan ChEM-H from the University of California, Berkeley where she served as the Executive Director of the Henry Wheeler Center for Emerging & Neglected Diseases (CEND).
Samantha Stubblefield, PhD
VP of Operations and Program Management, Convelo Therapeutics, Inc
Samantha’s academic training is in molecular biology (PhD) and immunology (post-doctoral work with Dr. Alan Levine, CWRU) but has always been drawn to translational research. After leaving academia in 2013, Samantha has focused on therapeutic development for retinal, neurological, and inflammatory disorders (small molecule, large molecule, and cell therapy). Samantha has a proven track record of building discovery programs to address specific scientific needs. She excels at team building, problem solving, and organizational leadership. While at Convelo, she has built a team and integrated medicinal chemistry, in vitro pharmacology, and ADME/DMPK functions resulting in nomination of 2 clinical candidate drugs. She is now leading BD efforts to provide a path to the clinic for these programs. In addition to her VP role at Convelo, Samantha is an advocate for mid-west biotech. She serves as an advisor to the Ohio Life Sciences Accelerator, volunteers for many drug discovery programs at Case Western Reserve University and supports entrepreneurial programs in Ohio. In her free time, Samantha likes to be outdoors with her family, playing softball, or in a gym lifting weights.
Kellan Gregory
Director of Product Excellence, Collaborative Drug Discovery
I am Collaborative Drug Discovery’s (CDD) Director of Product Excellence. Over the course of my past 19 years at CDD, I have worked with hundreds of researchers in academia, biotech and pharma. This has given me unique insight into the way our user-base operates. I drew from these experiences and employed user-driven design approaches (UX) to develop a deep understanding of drug discovery informatics and the manner in which data is shared both internally within an organization and externally with collaborators. CDD has proven to be a wonderful place to advance my career. I started as CDD’s Community Interest and was promoted to Head of Community Interest in November 2006. Over
the course of the next 4 years, I became increasingly involved in product-related activities and in June 2010, I was officially promoted to Product Manager. While I've since participated in an operations capacity, the CDD Vault product is still my core focus.
Anjali Pandey, PhD
SVP of Medicinal Chemistry, SUDO Biosciences
Anjali Pandey, PhD is an executive biopharmaceutical R&D leader with 25+ years of experience and expertise in all stages of discovery, development from initial lead identification through approval. Dr. Anjali Pandey has led medicinal chemistry at Sudo Biosciences since its founding in 2020, currently SVP, Medicinal Chemistry at Sudo Biosciences. Previously, Anjali was head of medicinal chemistry at Lengo Therapeutics (acquired by Blueprint Medicines Dec 2021) from April 2020 – March 2022. At Lengo Therapeutics, she led the discovery of first-in-human Phase 1/2 clinical candidate LNG-451 (BLU-451). She was Senior Vice President of Non-Clinical R&D and Chemistry at ARIA Pharmaceuticals (formerly twoXAR Pharma) from Feb 2020- April 2023. At Aria provided scientific leadership and oversight to Preclinical, Medicinal Chemistry, Translational, DMPK, CMC, and IND enabling studies. Prior to her role at Aria Pharma, Anjali was CSO/EVP for BridgeBio Pharma oncology companies TheRas Inc., Ferro Therapeutics and Navire Pharma. In CSO role built the teams, directed research and development activities for Oncology programs. Prior to that she spent fourteen plus years at Portola Pharmaceuticals, as SVP of Medicinal Chemistry & Chemical Development at Portola Pharmaceuticals, where she managed discovery and chemistry, manufacturing, and control (CMC) function for Bevyxxa™, Cerdulatinib and all the other small molecule programs. At Portola was responsible for the discovery of seven novel investigational new drug candidates and took one of the drugs betrixaban from discovery to FDA approval and was involved in the development of 2nd approved biologics product andexanet. Proficient in therapeutic areas of cardiovascular diseases (thrombosis, atherosclerosis, coagulation), inflammation, hematological malignancies, and oncology. She has been significant contributor towards discovery, development and IND-ready and/or 1st in human study for 16 compounds. Anjali led the development and management of Portola Pharma’s intellectual property portfolio. Dr. Pandey has published 45+ scientific publications and is inventor on 70 issued U.S. patents. She holds an MS from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and a PhD from Southern Illinois University.
Jonathan Baell, PhD
Executive Director, Head of Discovery Chemistry, Lyterian Therapeutics
Jonathan is Executive Director of Discovery Chemistry at Lyterian Therapeutics in the Bay area. Prior to this, for more than a decade, he was a Research Professor in Medicinal Chemistry and Director of the Australian Translational Medicinal Chemistry Facility, where he worked extensively at the private-public interface of translational medicinal chemistry. With more then 200 publications, and known mostly as the architect of the field of pan-assay interference compounds, or PAINS, the primary publication for which has garnered more than 3500 citations, he also has an extensive suite of granted and licensed patents. His translational efforts have resulted in significant awards. He holds significant editorial and societal positions and is Senior Editor of Future Medicinal Chemistry and recent President of the International Chemical Biology Society (2018-2021), now Chair of the Board (2022-2025). He is on the scientific or strategic advisory board of several national and international biotechnology companies. One of his enduring passions for the last 2 decades has been target-based high throughput screening, compound library design, nuisance compounds, and separating the “wheat from the chaff” from sets of high throughput screening hits, as well as hit-to-lead and lead optimization medicinal chemistry.
Jeff Blaney, PhD
Senior Director, Discovery Chemistry, Genentech
Jeff currently focuses on structure-based design for small molecule drug discovery (SMDD). He previously led SMDD computational chemistry and cheminformatics. Prior to Genentech, he held senior research leadership positions at SGX Pharmaceuticals, Metaphorics, DuPont Pharmaceuticals, and Chiron. Jeff received his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of California, San Francisco. He has many years of experience in drug discovery research, focusing on structure-based design, fragment-based discovery, virtual screening, combinatorial and parallel synthesis library design, AI/ML in SMDD, and chemical informatics.
Peter Gedeck, PhD
Research Informatics Senior Scientist, Collaborative Drug Discovery
Dr. Peter Gedeck holds a Ph.D. in chemistry. He is a scientist in the research informatics team at Collaborative Drug Discovery and develops novel technologies to be incorporated into CDD Vault. His research interests include the application of statistical and machine learning methods to problems in drug discovery. Prior to CDD, he worked for twenty years as a computational chemist in drug discovery at Novartis in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Singapore. Peter also teaches at University of Virginia's School of Data Science. Peter’s specialty is the development of machine learning algorithms to predict biological and physicochemical properties of drug candidates. His scientific work is published in more than 50 peer reviewed articles and five books.
Charlie Weatherall
Director of Customer Engagement, Collaborative Drug Discovery
Charlie Weatherall is the Director of Customer Engagement at Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD). Charlie has over three decades of experience working with industry-leading scientific software companies such as MDL (dating back to ISIS version 0.9 in ’91), SciTegic, Accelrys, CambridgeSoft, and IDBS. He has traveled extensively installing software, providing training, and leading workshops at customer sites and conferences. Charlie always strives to be the best customer advocate and trusted advisor for the CDD community. If you come to Memphis, you'll likely find Charlie stalking one of the many amazing local musicians, eating mountains of good ole Southern BBQ and trying to decipher the new/unknown language of both the teenage and infant grandchildren!
Walter Reiher, PhD
CIO, Revolution Medicines
Wally serves as the Chief Information Officer at Revolution Medicines, bringing a wealth of experience in leveraging technology to deliver insights, foster collaboration, enhance business processes and improve efficiency. Wally played a key role in the early development of a number of molecular modeling software companies and did research in computational chemistry as an independent contractor at Sterling Winthrop, Eastman Kodak, and Sanofi. Seeking a broader impact on research, Wally moved into research informatics, leading the implementation of decision support systems for drug discovery at Chiron, Affymax and Exelixis. Most recently, he held the position of vice president of information technology (IT) at Exelixis, where he delivered a number of major infrastructure projects, including the successful reimplementation of the company’s SAP ERP system. Wally earned his Ph.D. in computational chemistry from Harvard University, and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of California, San Diego.
Wendy Young, PhD
President, BioPharma Discovery
Wendy Young is a biotech executive with more than 30 years of experience in the discovery and development of new medicines for patients. She currently serves as a Board Member and Scientific Advisor at several biotech companies and is an Advisor at Google Ventures. Previously, Wendy was the Senior Vice President, Small Molecule Drug Discovery, at Genentech where she actively built and led the research & discovery organization. Under her leadership, more than 25 clinical candidates progressed into development. Additionally, Wendy led the BTK discovery program and is co-inventor of fenebrutinib, which is currently in Phase 3 trials for multiple sclerosis. Prior to joining Genentech, Wendy held leadership roles at Celera Genomics and Scios, a J&J company. Wendy earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from Princeton University under the guidance of E.C. Taylor and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratories of Samuel Danishefsky at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Barry Bunin, PhD
CEO and Board Director, Collaborative Drug Discovery
Barry A. Bunin, Ph.D. is the CEO of Collaborative Drug Discovery. Dr. Bunin has overseen $75 million in business transactions over the last two decades. Prior to CDD, he was an Entrepreneur in Residence with Eli Lilly & Co. Dr. Bunin is on a patent for Kyprolis™ (Carfilzomib for Injection) — a selective proteasome inhibitor that received accelerated FDA approval for the treatment of patients with multiple myeloma that was widely viewed as the centerpiece of Amgen’s $10.4 Billion acquisition of Onyx Pharmaceuticals.
Dr. Bunin was the founding CEO, President, & CSO of Libraria (now Eidogen-Sertanty). At Libraria, he led a team that integrated exhaustive reaction capture (synthetic chemistry) with gene-family wide SAR capture (medicinal chemistry). On the scientific side, he co-authored “Chemoinformatics: Theory, Practice, and Products” (Springer-Verlag), a text that overviews modern chemoinformatics technologies, and “The Combinatorial Index” (Academic Press), a widely used text on high-throughput chemical synthesis. In the lab, Dr. Bunin did medicinal synthetic chemistry developing patented new chemotypes for protease inhibition at Axys Pharmaceuticals (now Celera) and RGD mimics to inhibit GP-IIbIIIa at Genentech. Dr. Bunin received his B.A. from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where he synthesized and tested the initial 1,4-benzodiazepine libraries with Professor Jonathan Ellman.
Peter Warner, DPhil
Senior Program Officer, Discovery and Translational Sciences, Global Health, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Peter joined the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2013 after a 28-year international career in the Pharma industry where he held several Vice-President level positions. Trained as a medicinal chemist, he has worked across a broad range of therapy areas delivering drug candidates to the clinic. Immediately prior to joining the BMGF he led the AstraZeneca Neglected Diseases Research Unit in Bangalore. Within the BMGF he manages a portfolio of drug discovery grants focused primarily on tuberculosis, malaria and anti-viral diseases. He is the leader of the TB Drug Accelerator consortium which comprises 26 organizations that together delivers at least 1 new candidate drugs into development each year. Other interests include the use of AI/ML in drug discovery and developing drug discovery capabilities in LMICs.