Collaborative Drug Discovery receives additional grant for TB drug research

Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. (CDD) today announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has extended its previous grant to CDD to create a novel database to spark collaborative efforts to discover more effective drugs against 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.

Over the past two years, the CDD TB database has integrated the efforts of academic, non-profit, government and corporate laboratories distributed across the globe to accelerate their efforts to discover new therapies against this deadly disease.

Over the next three years, CDD will play a critical role in facilitating collaborations among leading TB researchers — now including three large pharmaceutical companies — aimed at advancing the best drug prospects. CDD will focus its powerful archiving, mining, and collaboration capabilities on supporting the workflows of screening centers searching to identify better drug leads that can be turned into more effective therapies for TB. CDD will help these collaborations work smoothly by securely sharing data among the labs and providing additional bioinformatics services to catalyze drug discovery.

"For six years CDD has focused on supporting humanitarian as well as commercial drug discovery. Now we are excited to put our new CDD Projects technology to the test. CDD Projects enables natural yet secure real-time collaborations among researchers that mimics the way people work in the pharmaceutical industry," said Barry Bunin, PhD, CEO & President of CDD.

"This project has enabled the creation of a unique database of well over 300,000 molecules with screening data against Mycobacterium tuberculosis," said Sean Ekins, PhD, Director of Collaborations. "We have also collected literature data and patent information for many compounds and freely shared this data with the research community. In addition we have enabled many groups to store and share their small molecule screening data, securely over the Internet 'in the cloud' using unique proprietary technologies."

The foundation's supplement extends the project to five years and increases the total grant to $2,796,000.