February 25, 2014
A three part series exploring the unique challenges of Consortia scientists
Part 1 – What’s in it for you, the person ultimately responsible for extracting value from a collaborative mixture of heterogeneous academic, CROs, and drug discovery brains.
You have been successful in your career. And your reward is the enormous responsibility of advancing a new drug against a difficult target in today’s hypercompetitive, resource-scarce environment. You are aware of the rapid iterations and decisive group decisions that are the hallmark of a successful drug discovery project. But that was easier in a different era when all the work was done in one place. Today, making rapid progress is more of a cultural and interpersonal challenge because all the resources are not in one organization directly under your control.
In a sense it is a relief to be able to call the shots, but clearly you are working with some missing pieces of the traditional infrastructure. How can you effectively track who is doing what, when, and at what rate? How do you get the diverse scientists, all working with their own goals and bosses, to effectively collaborate all together? To effectively navigate these complicated waters, CDD has developed an innovative, reliable, and useful collaborative platform.
First and foremost, you need to capture data from the experiments – otherwise what is the point of funding and running the darn experiments. This is typically much harder than one might expect, as the technician or postdoc running the experiments may leave for a new job, or might be unfamiliar with traditional user-hostile databases. You must ensure that all the positive and negative results are captured for posterity? How else will you optimize the tradeoffs between potency, secondary efficacy, toxicity, side effects, ADME and PK/PD?
Fortunately for you, CDD Vault is simple enough to use that even researchers who have never touched a database will have no difficulty. Automated data-capture templates can significantly lower the activation barrier for routine, ongoing data archival. Compliance is the key and CDD’s technology and services were especially designed to make compliance much easier.
In contrast to your previous paradigm (where all the work was done in one company and all the data ware captured by mandate in a single corporate database), this brave new universe of distributed organizations across time zones makes your project dependent upon the automatic capture and secure sharing of data from individuals you have not hired, do not directly manage, and perhaps have never even met face-to-face. Fortunately, the CDD Vault is significantly easier and more pleasant to use than any other database on the market. It has been designed from day one for accurate, easy data capture, and it is intuitive for the most novice user who has never used a registration or SAR database.
The challenges associated with capturing and aggregating distributed data in a collaboration are often overlooked until it is too late. As the number of collaborations grows and changes over time, the data work quickly becomes unwieldy for the finite resources actually charged with tracking progress. In contrast, with CDD Vault, a fixed number of resources can stay abreast of a growing number of complex collaborations. There are individuals currently managing 20 different projects with CDD Vault, each with their own unique idiosyncrasies. CDD Vault gives you complete control over which data subsets are kept private, and which are shared with which collaborators.
To be successful and capital-efficient, your project needs to combine the best of all the past, current, and future investments. And CDD Vault allows you to intelligently mine it for potency, selectivity, toxicity and other critical SAR trends.
CDD Vault has effectively lowered the “activation barrier” for data archival and utilization of low, medium, and even high throughput experiments through a series of fundamental innovations (see “the top 10 ways CDD has democratized informatics technologies for drug discovery researchers”).
You used to keep on top of everything by meeting face to face, working in adjacent labs, nd via regularly scheduled project team meetings. Now, thanks to CDD Vault, you have an intimate online space to capture, assess, and securely share collaborative drug discovery data and analyses. Knowledge will be captured, shared, and used. Trends will be seen earlier. Time and money will be saved. More will be accomplished within the same budget. Promising lines of inquiry will bear fruit. Dead ends will be quickly identified and abandoned before mucho dinero is wasted.
Download the entire three part series below:
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