LABORATORY INFORMATICS


Profile: Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD)


Sophia Ktori reveals the informatics company’s history – and plans for the future


Modern drug discovery exploits high content, high throughput, and high complexity processes. Managing the wealth of chemical structures, bioactivity and other assay data results requires an informatics infrastructure that puts data at scientists’ fingertips, and facilitates searching, analysis and data partitioning, comments Barry Bunin, president and CEO at Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD). ‘The drug discovery space needs


intuitive software that keeps data secure and accessible for a distributed set of authorised personnel. As collaborations evolve, new users need to be productive quickly, easily accessing shared research and results. Capturing data and experimental workflows in a single system provides the necessary context to analyse results and helps to avoid unnecessary repetition of experiments.’ Based in Burlingame, California, and Cambridge, UK, CDD was spun out of Eli Lilly in 2004 to develop and commercialise a holistic informatics platform that addresses the needs of the drug discovery sector. The firm’s flagship CDD Vault is a


hosted, web-based data repository through which drug discovery teams can access, mine and interrogate their chemical structures, assay results and associated experimental and research results. Built from the ground up as a single platform rather than an aggregation of software modules that sit atop a traditional, sample-centric laboratory information management system


18 Scientific Computing World December 2017/January 2018


 A screenshot from the CCD Vault


(LIMS), CDD Vault provides a full range of capabilities from a single login and integrated web interface. Functionality is organised into meaningful feature sets with no hidden add-ons: Activity & Registration, Inventory, Visualization and ELN.


‘Our founders really understood the cheminformatics space, and wanted to address the hugely underserved academic and biotechnology drug discovery sector,’ Kellan Gregory, CDD’s director of product excellence, explains. ‘Many of our competitors went after big pharma, developing complex, custom solutions that take years to set up and are expensive to maintain. Instead, we created a far more cost-effective, focused, and easy-to-implement platform that requires no IT expertise on the part of our customers.’


CDD Vault provides a dynamic visualisation tool to easily spot trends, zoom and filter to further refine, drill down on points of interests, and export to share with colleagues. The importance of visual inspection can’t be overstressed, Gregory suggests. ‘We all like pictures and it’s a necessary step of data analysis. We have built an amazing visualisation tool that leverages modern reactive design principles. Users can retrieve data from anywhere within CDD Vault, creating a report which is the foundation of a visualisation session. Compare up to 16 different parameters simultaneously, look for correlations or identify compounds of interest. Easily generate charts and graphs for presentations and reports.’ CDD Vault also offers key electronic


laboratory notebook (ELN) functionality, developed for the drug discovery industry.


@scwmagazine | www.scientific-computing.com


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