From the desk of Dr. Barry Bunin
On 29 April 2026, at age 79, Dr. Lynn Silver passed away. She was a giant in antimicrobial research at Merck and played an instrumental role in galvanizing the research community to capture the wisdom and data donations when companies moved away from antimicrobial research. Dr. Jennifer Leeds (ex-Novartis head of antibacterial discovery) shared a heartfelt post filled with personal comments from scientists. Her post made me think about what more we can do together.
Antibiotics are among the most important tools of modern medicine. And yet, unlike many other drug classes (GLP-1 receptor agonists, statins, etc.), they are only used in short courses – when they work, they are highly effective. Compounds to address the inevitable emergence of resistance are hopefully used less often, at best stockpiled for rare use or in anticipation of a contagious bacterial outbreak. Resistance becomes more likely when antibiotics are overprescribed for humans and other species. Bacteria can not only develop resistance; through horizontal gene transfer, they can also pass resistance traits to other bacteria. Vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (VRSA) is rare, but when it occurs it is very serious. This specific example shows the general need for new antibiotics to stay ahead of the curve. Although there are limited commercial markets, there is a collective humanitarian need to have additional antibiotics on “our collective shelf”.
Through the SPARK project, CDD has worked with both nonprofit organizations and for-profit companies on data donations relating to Gram-negative bacterial whole-organism MIC assays, target-specific IC50 measurements, and compounds with efflux activity along with corresponding models. Key literature data were carefully curated by domain experts with extensive metadata context (species, strains, etc.). These data allow apples-to-apples comparisons for model building by future generations of scientists and AI agents.
Today, with Re-SPARK, CDD is offering no-cost Read-Export access to the original SPARK Vault for any researcher who emails Re-SPARK@collaborativedrug.com. The data are already publicly available. Additional contextual information is available to support experimental scientists and model builders. In collaboration with OpenADMET, we welcome future competitions to make predictions around these valuable datasets. As always, private access remains commercial and fully private. For those working privately on research (for antimicrobial resistance or any other areas) private projects are available both within the (Re)-SPARK Vault (non-admin access) and in separate Vaults (with self-admin access). For details, email Re-SPARK@collaborativedrug.com.
Lynn created the spark for so many leading scientists; now, together, we carry the torch.