CDD's Pay for Privacy Model

Barry Bunin and co-authors Moses Hohman, Kellan Gregory, Kelly Chibale, Peter J. Smith and Sean Ekins just published an article in the March 2009 issue of Drug Discovery Today: Novel web-based tools combining chemistry informatics, biology and social networks for drug discovery.

This is a must-read for the Open Science community involved with drug discovery. Barry reviews several relevant online resources and details the workings of the Collaborative Drug Discovery system.

The point that I thought was most interesting is that Barry reports that CDD now has a policy of allowing unlimited uploading of data by non-subscribers. Researchers pay for privacy, which is a model that I think works well for a number of Web2.0 applications. For example, Wikispaces works that way. Since most users will likely want to limit their data sharing between selected collaborators, this is a good way to get the word out by groups who don't mind sharing publicly.

There are a few case studies in the article, including our UsefulChem project and our collaboration with Rajarshi Guha at Indiana University and Philip Rosenthal at UCSF to find new anti-malarial compounds. Barry illustrates the point with the assay results for one of our Ugi products:

CDD meeting at UCSF for Drug Discovery Oct08

Here is the call for poster presentations at the Collaborative Drug Discovery meeting on October 7, 2008 in San Francisco. I look forward to seeing Barry Bunin there and hopefully some of our collaborators.

Hosted by Gladstone Institute and QB3 at the UCSF, Mission Bay Campus

2nd Annual CDD Community Meeting (a free, 1-day event) on October 7th is the best place for the CDD community and all scientists to get together, discuss their research projects, and showcase their work to others in the community.

Early List of Confirmed Speakers:

* David Sullivan, MD, Johns Hopkins
* Fred Buckner, MD, University of Washington
* Janice Kranz, PhD, Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard
* Conor Caffrey, PhD, Sandler Center, UCSF
* Jean Claude-Bradley, PhD Dept. of Chemistry, Drexel University
* Sean Ekins, PhD, ex-Pfizer/Lilly Computational Chemist
* Andrea Altieri, PhD, ASINEX
* Robert Damoiseaux, PhD, UCLA Molecular Screening Shared Resource (MSSR) Center
* Moses Hohman, PhD, Head of Software, Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD roadmap)
* J. Leighton Read, MD (Alloy Ventures) - Financing Biomedical Innovation from academia to the market: From FluMist™ to Priority Review Vouchers and other stories
* Russell "Rusty" Bromley, Chief Operating Officer, Myelin Repair Foundation

Timely panel topics:

* Panel #1: What Foundations are looking for from Academic researchers?
* Panel #2: What makes collaborations successful within and between groups?

Who should attend?

* Scientists working in drug discovery
* Researchers who are involved in collaborations or generate complex drug discovery data
* Students who want to learn more about the drug discovery industry
* People who wish to network, establish new or strengthen existing collaborations
* Current CDD community members to set the collaborative platform's future direction
* Anyone interested in new drugs for diseases of the developing world, private public partnerships, and/or global health

Stay for the post-symposium reception from 6 -7pm!

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.