CDD Vault Case Studies

Via Nova Therapeutics deploys state-of-the-art drug discovery modalities to identify novel, first-in-class antivirals for a number of infectious diseases. The company gained “one true secure data repository” that supports a globally dispersed workforce by implementing CDD Vault, and has found great value in the platform's built-in Data Visualization capabilities. 

The Indiana Biosciences Research Institute (IBRI), a leading translational research center, supports the full loop of the design/make/test cycle by integrating CDD Vault and Schrödinger LiveDesign. 

Founded in Lausanne, Switzerland, Opna Bio has a portfolio of early discovery to mid-clinical stage small molecule drug programs targeting the hallmarks of cancers. With multiple projects generating massive and diverse datasets, from compound structures and chemistry, to screening and biology assay workflows, Opna has established CDD Vault as the central repository for all its preclinical data.

Psylo is developing a portfolio of next generation drugs for psychiatric disorders that are based on existing families of psychedelic compounds but redesigned as completely new chemical entities. The company implemented CDD Vault registration system and ELN as its central repository for storing, characterizing and managing its libraries, structure activity relationship (SAR) data, and screening assay data.

858 Therapeutics aims to develop drugs that act on novel targets in oncology, including proteins that regulate innate immunity. CDD Vault provides a complete informatics system which the 858 team uses from the conception of ideas, to synthesis and biological and ADME assays, animal studies, through the preparation of an IND and the supporting documents needed to move things forward.

TropIQ Health Sciences is a Dutch biotech that was established to commercialize an innovative malaria drug screening platform. Managing the huge volumes of compound, screening and experimental data was a primary challenge, until TropIQ implemented CDD Vault. Immediately the team was able to perform structural searches, combine chemistry and biological data, and trace experiments and results.

VIB is a major non-profit research institute in Belgium with extensive collaborations with external partners. The CDD Vault registration system and ELN have formed a key infrastructure that allows VIB's HTS Screening Core to digitalize its laboratory, streamline and maximize the value of data emerging from assay development and HTS projects.

In addition to having its own operations in both the US and China, Acerand Therapeutics works with multiple biology and chemistry CROs in search of novel drug candidates. Acerand streamlines this workflow by having the CROs upload data directly into the company's CDD Vault database, while at the same time protecting its IP by masking molecular structures with the Vault's security feature.

Plexium is a biotechnology company focused on discovering and developing protein degrading therapeutics to treat cancer and other serious diseases. By switching to CDD Vault from another informatics software, Plexium was able to reduce the number of system administrators from 3 full-time informaticians to one part-timer, freeing others to do science. The easy to use ELN resulted in 100% compliance, ensuring that the company's intellectual properties are always protected.

Standigm, an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, has developed a suite of innovative machine learning algorithms and AI-based workflows that take much of the guesswork out of drug discovery process and accelerate outcomes. To effectively handle the vast amount of data required for this approach, Standigm has implemented CDD Vault as a central data management infrastructure component in this discovery engine.

The COVID Moonshot is a global academia-industry consortium that aims to rapidly develop antivirals for COVID-19. The collaborative nature of the CDD Vault informatics platform has proven to be ideal for this type of large, decentralized collaborations that gather information throughout the whole drug discovery process. Dr. Lizbe Koekemoer of Oxford University describes how the project team leverages CDD Vault to effectively store, manage, and share data among multiple international partners.

Jubilant Biosys, a major international contract research organization (CRO), provides comprehensive drug discovery services to the global pharmaceutical industry. The company adopted CDD Vault and digitally transformed its data management, resulting in increased research productivity and customer satisfaction.

MoA Technology is a UK-based agritech company with a mission to identify safe herbicides with novel modes of action. The company needed an informatics infrastructure that could offer a database to hold vast numbers of images and screening data, act as a compound management platform, offer an ELN and provide a secure system through which to share data with partners. It was a tall order that CDD Vault has fulfilled impeccably, accordingly to MoA Tech's CTO.

X-Chem Montreal (formerly known as IntelliSyn) provides expertise and services in medicinal chemistry to accelerate the discovery of clinically viable, maximally de-risked drug candidates. In addition to CDD Vault's easy of use and flexibility, X-Chem scientists appreciate the fast and effective technical support provided by by the knowledgeable CDD team. “When I contact CDD, I get immediate results. Their support staff know what I want from informatics and articulate it better than I can."

GLAXOSMITHKLINE (GSK) has pioneered a model of true open partnership with academia through the Tres Cantos Open Lab Foundation, a ground-breaking PPP initiative set up at GSK’s dedicated DDW research facility at Tres Cantos in Madrid. Since its inception in 2011, the Tres Cantos Open Lab Foundation has managed more than 50 projects of drug discovery efforts against tuberculosis, malaria and kinetoplastid diseases (including trypanosomiasis, ie, African sleeping sickness and Chagas disease, and leishmaniasis). It is the world’s first open laboratory to investigate diseases of the developing world.

Redbrick Molecular has a rapidly growing library of novel building block and chemical scaffolds for medicinal chemistry from a variety of sources. They need to track compounds, properties, availability, and customer feedback in a secure database system that is easy for users. Andy Hogben tells us about their challenges and how they made use of CDD Vault to capture a complex catalog in a simple way.

The NIH Neuroscience Blueprint licenses CDD Vault across 7 leading academic laboratories, 4 CROs (including CDD), and ex-pharma drug development consultants. Their collective historical data was loaded into CDD Vault within one month, allowing them to work as a “virtual pharma” to develop compounds from chemical optimization through Phase I clinical testing.

Mironid is a biotech company that embraced the distributed research model with multiple physical sites and CRO collaborations. By implementing a hosted informatics platform early on, Mironid was able to ensure effective data management and sharing across the team and rapid advancement of several hit compounds for optimization.

The FP7-funded Kinetoplastid Drug Development (KINDReD) consortium has been created to strengthen and advance the current drug development pipeline in neglected infectious diseases. The consortium's key objective is to bring promising anti-trypanosomatid drug discovery initiatives forward by combining the strengths of key experts in industry and academia to create a unique and powerful drug discovery platform with the common goal of advancing promising laboratory-driven discoveries into clinical utility.

The KINDReD consortium integrates leading academic laboratories in Europe (Portugal, United Kingdom, France and Switzerland), the USA (California), India and South America (Brazil) with high throughput screening (HTS) facilities equally distributed between all three major kinetoplastid parasites. CDD Vault is the collaborative data management platform used across all consortium members.

UCLA's screening center uses CDD Vault to support all campus-wide collaborations. In addition, The Center for Medical Countermeasures against Radiation (CMCR) uses CDD Vault as part of their multi-institution consortium to develop small molecule radiation mitigators.

This Harvard spinout company uses CDD Vault to manage both academic-industry and China CRO collaborations. After becoming a customer in 2009, they have grown to a dozen CDD Vault users presently, all while filing for an IND for their HDAC inhibitor and raising $27M in a Series-B financing and a partnership with Celgene ($100M upfront cash).

In support of the foundation's pursuit of collaborative research on tuberculosis, CDD Vault is used by 250 researchers across 58 laboratories. Twenty different collaborations between teams have been enabled to securely share their data, and for this, CDD Vault won the BioIT World Editor's Choice Best Practices Award.

An ad hoc collaboration was established to evaluate anti-malarial compounds for the growing challenge of chloroquine resistance. A virtual screen was performed using CDD Vault with contributions from four independent groups across two continents. The most promising candidate compounds were assayed, and novel compounds that almost entirely reversed the resistance were identified. This process shaved months to years off a project relative to working independently and/or synthesizing new compounds from scratch.

Design and development of new drugs is a difficult endeavor. Small companies can spend a large amount of time just managing data and communicating results, let alone on scientific innovation and finding new candidates for development. viDA Therapeutics was one such company, and their use of Excel files to track their important chemistry and biology data lacked transparency, control and efficiency. By implementing CDD Vault, they achieved better control of data, vastly improved collaboration, and the ability to track diverse data types (chemistry, biology, pharmacology, structural biology/X-ray, patents, etc.).