University of Illinois Centre Enhances Collaboration and Data Integrity with School-Wide Licensing of CDD Vault
Situation
The University of Illinois Collaborative Engagement in Novel Therapeutic Research and Enterprise (UICentre) is the campus-wide drug discovery initiative at the University of Illinois, Chicago that utilizes existing resources to leverage the expertise of scientist and clinician teams across campus in collaborative engagement in translational research in drug discovery and development.
The mission of UICentre is transformative: to instill a scientific culture, and build accompanying technological and educational infrastructure that overcome the obstacles to translational drug discovery at UIC. The expertise of UICentre ranges from target validation and bioassay development to high-throughput screening analysis of novel compound libraries to medicinal chemistry incorporating structure-based, ligand-based and chemo-proteomics assisted drug design, in addition to pre-clinical drug metabolism and pharmacokinetic studies.
The specific aim of the UICentre is to create and support multidisciplinary collaborations that transform basic science projects into team-based drug discovery initiatives at UIC and across the Chicagoland academic community with the long-term objective of improving human health by creating novel drug candidates that can be translated into commercialized therapeutics.
Solution
The UICentre deployed Collaborative Drug Discovery’s CDD Vault, the cloud-based scientific data management system that securely manages both internal and external biological and chemical data. Deployment includes CDD school-wide licensing, freeing individual labs and researchers from having to purchase separate licenses, while providing a unified solution for secure electronic data storage and electronic laboratory notebooks (ELN)s.
UICentre and associated labs have deployed five instances of CDD Vault. UICentre’s CDD Vault stores more than 20,000 compounds.
Benefits
The University of Illinois Centre has found a number of benefits since adopting CDD Vault with school-wide licensing, including:
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Providing labs with a “single source of truth”
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Enhanced collaboration between chemists and biologists
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Meeting NIH requirements for data management and protection
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Ensuring data integrity and supports deep exploration
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Substantial savings versus individual licensing
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Protecting intellectual property
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Electronic Notebooks enhance research efforts and help prepare students for industry
School-Wide Licensing Provides Labs with a Single Source of Truth
UICentre values the ability of CDD Vault to provide researchers with a secure centralized data repository that provides what is often referred to as “a single source of truth.”
“With CDD Vault, everyone is looking at the same data,” Dr. Carlier says. “You don’t have one person looking at an Excel spreadsheet from a month ago, and another looking at one from last week, while you are trying to discuss the most current findings.”
“The confusion that comes from poor version control is very frustrating,” Dr. Carlier says. “Using CDD Vault we have all our data stored in a central data repository that our whole team and collaborators can look at. A secure, centralized repository is enabling. It helps keep a team focused on what are the latest findings and best hits.”
School-Wide Licensing Enhances Collaboration, Including Between Chemists and Biologists
School-wide licensing of CDD Vault makes for easier collaboration, including between chemists and biologists, Dr. Carlier finds.
“UICentre is the drug discovery center of the University of Illinois, Chicago, and we are funded by many stakeholders across the university,” Dr. Carlier says. “Our goal is to encourage collaborations with principal investigators from across the College of Medicine, the College of Pharmacy, and the College of Chemistry. We started using CDD Vault in the Fall of 2022 and it was quite clear that this platform could be transformational in creating collaborative teams. It makes it easy for chemists and biologists to work closely together.”
Dr. Carlier notes that the completeness of the data that can be stored in CDD Vault enables looking at old data in a new way.
“It is critical that we be able to see not just the data that we like and remember, but also the data that we didn't understand and sort of put on the backburner,” Dr. Carlier says. “Having all of the data in one repository allows you to go back with high fidelity to reinvestigate your hypothesis. One of the benefits of CDD Vault is that you can ask questions of big datasets, that help refine your conclusions. It helps us to not just look at the beautiful molecules that test positive in our assays, but at the ugly ones as well, to see what we can learn from them.”
School-Wide Site Licensing Helps Meet NIH Requirements for Data Management and Protection
The NIH introduced its Data Management and Sharing Policy as part of its longstanding commitment to making the results of NIH-funded research available. The NIH writes:
“Responsible data management and sharing has many benefits, including accelerating the pace of biomedical research, enabling validation of research results, and providing accessibility to high-value datasets.”
UICentre has found that its use of CDD Vault makes it easy to comply with the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy.
“As NIH-funded researchers we need to document our data management plan to the NIH when submitting our grant proposals,” Dr. Carlier says. “The NIH is very concerned that you have some way to track all your data and that you're not going to lose it. In our NIH applications, we state that we have CDD Vault, explain how we use it, and that all of our data is stored within the Vault so we can go back to reprocess it at any time.”
Even before the NIH issued its data management requirements, other research partners were requiring use of electronic data storage.
“Prior to UICentre’s adoption of CDD Vault, our sister institute, the Institute for Tuberculosis Research, was mandated to use CDD Vault by one of its chief partners,” Dr. Carlier says. “When organizations provide funds for research they want to make sure that the data is well managed and its value preserved.”
CDD Vault Helps Ensure Data Integrity and Supports Deep Exploration
UICentre uses CDD Vault to store all raw data to help ensure the integrity of its findings, and to help ensure findings can be replicated.
“An experiment might measure drug response across several concentrations, and we'll capture mid-curve data in terms of IC50 or EC50 or some other measure,” Dr. Carlier says. “These are numbers that we would typically report in journal articles, but it's much better if you can capture all the raw data, which is what we can do with CDD Vault. We can also see how many times an experiment was done, how many technical replicates, how many biological replicates. All of this can be precisely tracked through the assay dates.”
Storing all raw data within CDD Vault also makes it easy to go back and search the original data in new ways.
“We might screen 10,000 compounds for a particular biological activity, and we would naturally focus on the small percentage of compounds that performed well in our testing,” Dr. Carlier says. “We then might draw conclusions based on the activity and the structures of those compounds that tested positive. If we see they all have a methyl group, benzene ring, or some other common structure, we might want to go back and look at the other 99% in our raw data to see how common the structure is to help gauge the significance. With all of our raw data stored in CDD Vault, this type of deeper exploration is very easy to do.”
