skip to content

Company Overview

Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. (CDD) is the world's first platform for selectively sharing collaborative drug discovery data. Scientists working with the CDD community platform can pool their research in order to more effectively develop new drug candidates for commercial and humanitarian markets. CDD is based in Burlingame, California (15 miles south of San Francisco). The company has provided software and custom services to academic, foundation, and corporate clients since 2004. The CDD global community includes hundreds of scientists from leading research foundations, academia and industry. A subset of the data is available openly to the public at no cost.

Executive Team:

Barry A. Bunin, Ph.D. – President and Board Director

Barry A. Bunin, PhD is the President of Collaborative Drug Discovery. He co-authored “Chemoinformatics: Theory, Practice, and Products” (Springer-Verlag), a text that overviews modern chemoinformatics technologies, and “The Combinatorial Index” (Academic Press), a widely used text on high-throughput chemical synthesis. Prior to CDD, Dr. Bunin was an Entrepreneur in Residence with Eli Lilly & Co. Before that he was the founding CEO, President, & CSO of Libraria (now Eidogen-Sertanty). At Libraria, Dr. Bunin led a team that integrated exhaustive reaction capture (synthetic chemistry) with gene-family wide SAR capture (medicinal chemistry). In the lab, Dr. Bunin did medicinal synthetic chemistry developing patented new chemotypes for protease inhibition at Axys Pharmaceuticals (now Celera) and RGD mimics to inhibit GP-IIbIIIa at Genentech.

Dr. Bunin received his B.A. from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where he synthesized and tested the initial 1,4-benzodiazepine libraries with Professor Jonathan Ellman.

Moses M. Hohman, Ph.D. – Director of Software Development

Moses M. Hohman, PhD is the Director of Software Development at Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. Dr. Hohman brings expertise in building, architecting and managing software applications for bio- and cheminformatics software projects. He has extensive experience in object-oriented design and development, software development methods (for development, analysis, testing and project management), organizational dynamics, web computing, and biomedical informatics algorithms and applications. He writes about open R&D for the developing world and other scientific and software topics on his blog.

Previously Dr. Hohman was the Associate Director of Bioinformatics at Northwestern University's Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center (RHLCCC) and Center for Functional Genomics (CFG). He worked as a project and development manager for the CFG's NIH Neurogenomics project, an ENU mutagenesis effort that screened over 10,000 mice per year through a panel of neurologically-directed assays covering seven phenotypic domains. This work included both an intranet colony and phenotyping management system and a public, web-based mutant mouse distribution portal, Neuromice.org. Dr. Hohman was co-lead of the NCI Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) Architecture Best Practices Special Interest Group.

In addition to earning a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago working with Prof. Leo Kadanoff, Dr. Hohman graduated magna cum laude in physics from Harvard College.

Sylvia Ernst, Ph.D. – Director of Community Growth

Sylvia Ernst, PhD is the Director of Community Growth at Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. Dr. Ernst received her Ph.D. in Chemistry in Frankfurt, Germany working in the group of Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Kaim. At that time her research focused on using computational chemistry to find new catalysts for exploiting energy from sunlight. She has over 20 scientific publications. Interested in Chemical information and technology, she joined the Beilstein Institute and was a member of the core team which launched “CrossFire Beilstein”, a database which today is known and used by almost every chemist in the world. From there Sylvia worked in customer related functions with Beilstein Information Systems, MDL Information Systems, Elsevier MDL, and SciTegic/Accelrys. She joined CDD in 2007.

Sylvia’s extensive work with many pharmaceutical and biotech companies as well as academic and government institutions spans the globe, giving her a unique perspective on how the drug discovery and development process is evolving, and how new approaches may impact world health. She joined CDD because she believes that the best response to emerging global health crises is to foster collaborations that join the world’s enormous research capabilities into unified efforts.

Alpheus Bingham, Ph.D. – Board Director

Alph Bingham, PhD. is a pioneer in the field of open innovation and an advocate of collaborative approaches to research and development. He is co-founder, and former president and chief executive officer of InnoCentive Inc. Alph spent more than 25 years with Eli Lilly and Company, and brings deep experience in pharmaceutical research and development, research acquisitions and collaborations, and R&D strategic planning. He was instrumental in creating and developing Eli Lilly's portfolio management process as well as establishing the divisions of Research Acquisitions, the Office of Alliance Management and e.Lilly, a business innovation unit that incubated a wide range of new ventures that exploit open networks,including: InnoCentive, YourEncore, Inc., Coalesix, Inc., Maaguzi, Inc., Indigo Biosystems, Seriosity, Chorus and Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.

He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Innocentive, Fast Track Systems, Inc., and Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.; the advisory boards of Navitas Pharma and the Center for Collective Intelligence (MIT), the Business Innovation Factory, and as a member of the board of trustees of the Bankinter Innovation Foundation in Madrid. He serves as a Visiting Scholar at the National Center for Supercomputing Application at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He is also the former chairman of the Board of Editors of the Research Technology Management Journal. Dr. Bingham was the recipient of the The Economist's Fourth Annual Innovation Summit "Business Process Award" for InnoCentive. He was also named as one of Project Management Institute's "Power 50" leaders in October 2005. Dr. Bingham currently blogs on innovation at http://www.innoblogger.com/ and participates in the Monitor Talent speaker network.

Alph received a B.S. in chemistry from Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Stanford University.

Peter Cohan – Board Director

Peter Cohan has over 20 years in senior management, business development, sales and marketing roles. In 1998, he joined Symyx Technologies, Inc. to found Symyx’s Discovery Tools® business, . As Vice President Discovery Tools, and then President Symyx Discovery Tools Inc., Mr. Cohan grew the organization from inception into a $30MM per year business.

Before Symyx, Peter Cohan gained experience in the creation, implementation, and application of software tools and systems in support of pharmaceutical, agrochemical, and chemical research during 13 years at MDL Information Systems, Inc. While at MDL, he progressed through roles in technical marketing, product marketing, field marketing, sales, sales management and marketing management, culminating as Vice President Customer Marketing. In addition to serving on the board of directors of Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc., Peter is on the advisory board of Excellin, Inc. Peter Cohan is also the principal at The Second Derivative which he founded in 2003 to address the challenge of bringing a method for consistent success to the process of creating and delivering software demonstrations. He has a successful track-record as an agent of change in both internal and external roles. Peter Cohan launched the DemoGurus Community Website in 2004 to provide a high-value, evergreen forum for gathering and delivering best practices on demonstration methods and tools for the business software community. In 2003, Peter Cohan published the first edition of Great Demo!, the book that presents the demonstration methodology generated and practiced through the experience of 1000's of demonstrations. The 2nd Edition of Great Demo! was published in March 2005. Peter Cohan has experience as an individual contributor, manager and senior management in marketing, sales, and business development. He has also been, and continues to be, a customer.

Peter Cohan holds a degree in Chemistry from the University of California at San Diego.

Ed Niehaus – Board Director, Chairman

Ed Niehaus is the chairman of Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. In the past he has served on the boards of ClickAction, (NASDAQ: CLAC), Avinon and Bio Quiddity and as board observer of SocialText. Ed joined Cypress Ventures in 2003 and was a general partner until 2006.

Ed was CEO of Niehaus Ryan Wong, Inc., a PR agency, until 2002. NRW helped many Silicon Valley companies, doing its best-known work for Apple (launched Jobs' comeback, the Powerbook & iMac), VeriSign (launched company), Yahoo (first five years) and Pixar (movie launches, Academy Award campaign). As CEO, Ed steered the award-winning agency to become a nearly $20M company with offices in SF, NY and Austin. Ed led the development of NRW's Architecture of Identity strategic branding process, in which over thirty of the agency's clients engaged, resulting in clear and actionable definitions of their companies' vision, positioning and voice.

Ed has a BSME degree from Duke University and is a licensed professional engineer.