July 23, 2013
What's in it for you as the lab manager - the one ultimately responsible for results and funding?
All it takes is one paradigm-shifting experiment or compound to validate your whole approach. You have an interesting hypothesis that’s why you are raising all the money and doing all these experiments. You have a hunch this will work, you just need to find and augment that new signal in the noise. With CDD you’ll get there faster. Even with fewer resources you’ll discover that new discovery which is what it’s all about. CDD provides a nimble solution for today’s fast moving science. And when you find something really interesting, you’ll hit the ground running and maintain momentum when working with collaborators with complementary capabilities to take it to the next level.
The new twist with CDD, with secure Projects in the Collaborative CDD Vaults is the ability to really synergize with others. Your own unique capabilities and insights are captured and complemented by the work of other trusted collaborators. Perhaps these are your existing, trusted favorite collaborators or contact CDD to get new collaborators as we have many trusted, vetted partners. Whether with one or many partners you can use the secure data partitioning capabilities built right into CDD Projects. You see all the data you should. And your collaborator(s) see only the data you explicitly designate for them to see in their specific project. You control which academic or CRO eyes access which experiments in which projects. If they are not part of a Project, not only will they not see the data – they won’t even be aware that project exists.
You have the flexibility of setting up either a formal registration and/or a more informal, flexible non-registration database.
For those who appreciate the power of unique registration and batch IDs, CDD provides a complete registration solution. Registration and capture of data may not sound sexy, but simply capturing data (and making it easier to do so) is part of CDD charm and value…and it is the prerequisite for accumulated learning and new knowledge over time. So don’t underestimate its importance. Any significant organization knows that it is critical to capture so called “institutional knowledge”, but up until now this has been out of the reach of smaller labs. For others who simply wish as flexibly as possible wish to easily capture heterogeneous data, there is an even easier to use non-registration system that still has chemical intelligence to recognize synonyms.
With CDD, the cost is merely pennies on the dollar relative to proteins, molecules, and staff. With this “low risk, high reward” investment, your laboratory will have significant advantages over using no system and relying on Excel® files distributed who knows where. Beyond the obvious benefits of capturing your laboratories output, you’ll much more likely have a new, unexpected, valuable discovery. Drug discovery is about finding that ever elusive, proverbial golden needle in Monet’s haystack.
You can work with fine-grained temporal control using Projects in CDD Vault to share data with one collaborator on one assay and another collaborator on a second assay. Alternatively, perhaps one set of compounds is specific to one set of collaborators and another series will move forward with a different set of actors. With CDD all the data partitioning and security is built right in. This includes multiple levels of security. The basics include of course a secure login, 2-factor authentication for cell phone confirmation, IP address restriction and projects within vaults (more advanced details are available online and via the CDD security officer). The most paranoid users can rest assured that CDD is used securely throughout the world with a 100% perfect security record. CDD has been up 99.98% of the time and completely up except scheduled updates going back non-stop to 2010!
CDD’s unique collaborative design means data sets are essentially tagged in the Projects. Projects can be used to control data access. Projects can also be used even just within your own group as a convenient mechanism for classifying similar sets of experiments, assays or, well, projects.
With projects, data sets do not need to be tediously uploaded multiple times. It scales. As experiments are being done the data is easily captured for timely or asynchronous analysis by different brains with different biases and insights. CDD’s intuitive GUI and templates automate the routine aspects of data capture. Technicians and new graduate students will quickly master the technology. Heck, grad students are so tech savvy today they might even master the intuitive technology faster and teach you a new trick or two. The folks who do this traditionally painful work will thank you for making their work sooooo much easier and more enjoyable. And you’ll see them really turn-the-crank.
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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!