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Collaborative Drug Discovery Receives Gates Foundation Grant to Support the Development of a Database to Accelerate Discovery of New Therapies Against Tuberculosis
BURLINGAME, Calif., Nov 18, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ --
Collaborative Drug Discovery,
Inc. (CDD) today announced that it has received a grant for $1,896,923 from
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a collaborative database that
will enable scientists to archive, mine, and selectively collaborate around
their research data to discover new cures for tuberculosis (TB). The TB
bacillus infects approximately one third of the world's population and the
disease kills over 1.5 million people every year. The CDD TB database will
integrate the efforts of academic, other non-profit, and corporate
laboratories distributed across the globe and accelerate the discovery of new
therapies against this deadly disease.
CDD also announced that it has hired Sean Ekins, PhD, as Director of
Collaborations for the project. "The neglected disease research community
needs new ways to integrate disjointed drug discovery efforts so that
dispersed labs can form efficient virtual pharmaceutical organizations," said
Dr. Ekins. "This project will spark collaborative efforts to discover more
effective drugs against TB that are less expensive and easier to administer."
"This grant promotes our goal of developing more effective medicines for
those in developing countries who need them most," said Ken Duncan, Senior
Program Officer at the Gates Foundation. "CDD's technology will help the
entire TB research community to collaborate more easily. We hope it will speed
the scientific breakthroughs urgently needed to make effective therapies more
accessible to the world's poorest people, and confront the challenges of
multidrug- and extensively drug-resistant TB strains."
The two-year project will initially involve eight academic research groups
and later expand to include other participants. "CDD has already established
its software platform as an indispensable tool for many scientists studying
neglected infectious diseases including TB," said Professor Carl Nathan, MD,
Chairman, Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Weill Medical College
of Cornell University. "This grant from the Gates Foundation will encourage
many more researchers to participate in the CDD community."
"We are thrilled that the Gates Foundation is supporting this project,"
said Barry Bunin, PhD, CEO & President of CDD. "Early on, CDD decided to focus
on supporting humanitarian as well as commercial drug discovery. This grant
validates that decision and provides a model for CDD to work with industry and
other foundations targeting additional specific diseases."
CDD is currently working with the Myelin Repair Foundation (MRF), which
has pioneered a research paradigm that organizes diverse academic groups into
highly-structured collaborations with a sharp focus on outcomes. "We are
delighted to see more organizations and researchers endorse the emerging
collaborative model for drug discovery," said Scott Johnson, President and
Founder of the Myelin Repair Foundation (MRF). The MRF and CDD recently
partnered to customize CDD's tools as part of a proof-of concept program to
organize data from the MRF's highly-structured myelin repair scientific
collaboration.
About Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.
Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. (CDD) provides web-based software that
organizes preclinical research data to help scientists advance new drug
candidates more effectively. The CDD database enables scientists to "archive,
mine, and collaborate"(R) around preclinical chemical and biological drug
discovery data through a web-based interface. The software helps distributed
research groups to safely store and intelligently analyze small molecule,
enzyme, cell and animal bioactivity data accumulated from both low-throughput
and high-throughput screens. Scientists can choose which datasets to keep
completely private and which datasets, if any, to share securely with selected
colleagues. Unique collaboration features and CDD's community-oriented
approach help unite globally dispersed humanitarian efforts against neglected
infectious diseases. Similar collaborative strategies are also rapidly gaining
prominence in the commercial arena. CDD offers its industrial-strength
database software at a price affordable to academic laboratories, research
foundations, and small companies. For more information, visit
http://www.collaborativedrug.com.
SOURCE Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.
http://www.collaborativedrug.com
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