UsefulChem on CDD

Barry Bunin from Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) has just given me word that UsefulChem now has an account on their database free of charge. Their current business model involves charging data contributors so I appreciate the invitation.

Our account can be accessed at http://www.collaborativedrug.com/ (user: usefulchemistry, password: cdd). There is currently a set of compounds from our molecules blog. One of the features that I think will be useful for us is a way to record assay results. This comes in at a good time, since we just received the first results from the National Cancer Institute on the screening of one our compounds against tumor cell lines.

It will be interesting to compare CDD with other services like ChemSpider, as they evolve. One current limitation with CDD is that it is not possible to create links to molecules or assays that are truly public and indexable.

However, they are making some data pseudo-public by providing a public username and password (UsefulChem is not yet part of this beta):

http://demo.collaborativedrug.com/ (login as demo, password cdd)

More on this from their recent press release:

Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD, Inc) is pleased to announce the introduction of its next generation database technology. Collaborative Drug Discovery's Web-based database enables scientists to collaborate in novel, global efforts to more effectively develop new drug candidates for commercial and humanitarian markets. The technology enables novel community-based research efforts that become more and more useful as additional participants contribute data. Publicly available data sets currently in the system include the FDA orphan and approved drugs and small molecule drug discovery data dating back over half a century. These data sets pertain to a diverse group of neglected diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis, African Sleeping Sickness, Chagas Disease and Leishmania.