Drug Development For Neglected Tropical Diseases Is Finally Getting A Tool That Can Get The Job Done

Barry Bunin, like all successful entrepreneurs, has a skilled eye for recognizing needs—and heading them off—long before others. In 2004, when he started Eli Lilly spin-off software company Collaborative Drug Discovery, collaboration in drug discovery wasn’t like it is today.

Drug discovery’s most recognizable problem is the length of time it takes to deliver new drugs to market—and the shockingly high failure rate experienced by most drugs on their journey to the patient. This is one reason why the incredible rate at which the COVID-19 vaccine was delivered to a globe desperately in need was so phenomenal. While ineffective animal models, technological limitations, and clinical trial recruitment and retention challenges are all important contributors to this problem, the one theme that the biggest players in pharma have increasingly recognized over the past decade is the damage caused by ineffective collaboration across the multi-disciplinary teams that work to bring a drug to market.

“While it’s often true that the initial discovery effort requires a relatively small team of researchers, once the decision has been made to advance candidates down the path of clinical development and commercialization, more teams and scientific domains are brought into the process,” explains Loren Perelman, a PhD scientist and scientific SaaS executive with over 15 years of experience in biotech and biopharma. “There are a large number of specialists working on their specific aspect of the development process. Every group is producing more complex, specialized data than we’ve ever produced, and being able to aggregate and analyze that data in a cohesive way across groups is critical to bring a drug to market. It all boils down to effective communication.”

A software solution to a problem most didn’t recognize

Of course, Barry Bunin already anticipated the importance of collaboration and the impact ineffective collaboration could have on the success (or failure) of drug development 19 years ago. So, while most were just starting to leverage Excel workbooks and other digital forms of data management, he introduced the more elegant solution the pharma industry didn’t yet know they needed: CDD Vault, a cloud-based data management and analysis platform that facilitates seamless data sharing and decision-making across chemistry and biology teams working in drug discovery. It is a browser-based system that can be logged into from anywhere in the world, as long as you have an internet connection.

“CDD was born in the cloud,” says Abraham Wang, Head of Marketing for CDD Vault. “We were in the cloud before cloud computing was a thing. People were starting to move towards the digital route of capturing data, but what that meant was capturing information on your local machine in an Excel spreadsheet or Word document. These were not backed up on a cloud server, so researchers ended up with multiple versions of their data on different computers and had to email data files around, which was not secure. There was no such thing as software-as-a-service then, so Barry was quite visionary when he founded CDD.”

To put it into perspective, CDD Vault’s closest comparison, PerkinElmer’s Signals Research Suite Platform, was launched in the fall of 2021. Even other well-known competitors, like Benchling, didn’t arrive on the scene for another eight years—well after CDD Vault announced collaborations with GSK, Novartis, Pfizer, and the NIH.

Addressing the neglected

But CDD Vault didn’t just catch the eye of pharma giants. It didn’t take long for other visionaries to recognize the transformative power of CDD Vault. Since 2008—four years after the birth of Collaborative Drug Discovery—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been funding the company’s initiatives to support the global tuberculosis (TB) research community and advance the discovery and development of cures for the disease that sickens over 10 million and claims the lives of over 1 million people each year.

Collaborative Drug Discovery’s work with TB isn’t an accident. TB is one of the most critical neglected tropical diseases—a diverse group of 20 conditions mainly prevalent in tropical areas and that mostly affect the world’s poorest people. These diseases affect 1 in 6 people, or approximately 1.4 billion people worldwide, resulting in approximately 57 million years of life lost due to premature disability.

Yet because they impact poor areas with few resources, the neglected tropical diseases are understudied and aren’t treated with the same sense of urgency as first-world diseases. COVID-19, for example, killed approximately 3 million people in the first two years of the pandemic—that’s over 450 times less people than die from TB in a single year alone. Global governments and biopharma companies rallied to produce a vaccine approved for emergency use in less than a year—and rightly so. But there’s no scientific reason similar successes can’t be replicated for any of the neglected tropical diseases.

I sat down with Bunin in the lead-up to the SynBioBeta Conference in Oakland this May, where synthetic biology leaders will talk about groundbreaking work being done in different parts of the world. Bunin told me that his passion for supporting tropical diseases research began after a visit to India, where “one sees poverty and disease everywhere.” He took the driver of a car in an accident to a hospital, which was so poor it didn’t have a phone yet boasted front steps full of the sick and dying.

Over the years, CDD Vault has amassed large amounts of TB and malaria data, which they’ve made freely available for the research community to use and build on through CDD Public. Additional work with collaborators on several other neglected diseases is also available.

Advancing research in Africa

As Collaborative Drug Discovery celebrates its 19th birthday, it’s also celebrating a new initiative for supporting neglected tropical diseases: CDD Vault is now freely available to African researchers actively working to develop novel therapeutics for neglected tropical diseases.

“We know that there are a lot of researchers in Africa working on [the neglected tropical diseases] and we also know from experience that a lot of those people are probably working on something without knowing that others are also working on exactly the same thing,” says Wang, speaking to the motivation behind this particular initiative. “As a scientific community, we can save time and make so much more progress if we know what we’re all doing and collaborate a little more. Our hope is that by making the platform accessible to others, we can facilitate that collaboration and accelerate progress.”

This initiative, announced last month, has already been met with incredible enthusiasm. “[This is] much needed and timely,” said Dr. Kelly Chibale, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Director of the UCT Drug Discovery and Development Centre. “The CDD solution is specifically tailored to the needs of the drug discovery researchers and will allow proper organization of data to enhance the impact of the research, reduce duplication of efforts, and provide African researchers with the platform to facilitate collaboration.”

While this effort was born out of Bunin’s passion for neglected tropical diseases, it was made possible by the hundreds of paying customers that use CDD Vault and have actively worked with Collaborative Drug Discovery engineers and data scientists to iterate and improve the platform over the past 19 years, making it the only available platform that can facilitate the collaboration between biologists and chemists that is necessary to make drug discovery faster and more effective.

“We are not a non-profit organization,” says Wang, “but an industry-leading platform. African researchers should be confident that they’re getting access to a cutting edge technology that’s going to help them for years to come. We will know if we’ve succeeded in this mission when we look at the numbers—how many scientists are logging in, how many compounds are they adding, are they sharing data with collaborators, and how many drug candidates are advancing into clinical trials? It would be great if we could see a couple of candidates advancing into phase II clinical trials within the next five years.”

Thank you to Embriette Hyde for additional research and reporting on this article. I’m the founder of SynBioBeta and some of the companies I write about are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference and weekly digest.