December 3, 2025

Behind the Code: The Human Side of Collaborative Drug Discovery

Part 1: Foreword and Awareness

"Silicon Valley and the greater Bay Area are many things. It is ground zero for the global innovation economy: the birthplace of Google and Gilead; Netflix and NVIDIA; Oracle and OpenAI. A land of outsized one-syllable personalities: Jobs, Musk, Thiel, and Zuck. A complex mix of wealth and poverty, mushroom microdosing alongside fentanyl fatalities...." Get the full book here.

Part 2: Trauma

"My high school wrestling coach’s youngest son, Jay Jackson, wrestled at Stanford—and was a 2-time captain and 2-time NCAA Championship qualifier. After college, Jay was kidnapped by a deranged person with a gun yet still had the presence of mind and wrestling technique (while blindfolded, mind you) to capture his kidnapper, call 911, and get rescued by police..." Get the full book here.

Part 3: Empathy

"Our Zendesk ranking for responsiveness and customer delight is constantly in the 99th percentile (the top, not the bottom). In many companies support is often an afterthought (think being on hold at a call center). In contrast, at CDD we constantly put the A-Team on a pedestal and recognize “caring more” as a major differentiator. We also listen to every request from every customer in our weekly “market think” meeting—both to give immediate feedback and to prioritize the most important capabilities for the user community..." Get the full book here.

Part 4: Collaboration

"When all departments at CDD are perfectly aligned, complicated problems are solved like a Rubik’s Cube. Hence, Rubik’s is shorthand for our management team, where collaborative awareness manifests. At CDD, ‘Rubik’s Philosophy’ means having great empathy for other departments (and people)..." Get the full book here.

Part 5: Innovation

"The latest collaborative innovation is the Inference Model—zero click, continuously optimized, automated predictions. Often there is a rift between computational scientists and experimentalists. With these zero-click models researchers can mathematically see and assess predictions side-by-side with the experimental results. It no longer becomes a religious question of who is right (the computational scientist or the experimentist), because in this collaborative environment the scope and limitations of each model and experiment become self-evident..." Get the full book here.

Part 6: Collaborators

"I can’t tell you the number of highly critical, perfectionist leaning scientists who are difficult to work with - it is a cliche. Like the actor who needs his own trailer prepared just so. On the other hand there are people so nice and kind, but they never get anything done..." Get the full book here.

Tag(s): CDD Blog