Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) and SRI International won a second Phase II Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) grant to support the continued development of a computational approach to tuberculosis (TB) drug discovery.

The ongoing work will focus on extending a systems biology-cheminformatics platform for developing and evaluating molecular mimics, progress molecules discovered during Phase I of the project, and expand the scope of their research and identify new TB therapeutic candidates. The collaborators will in addition develop a software for bioscience research that provides query and analysis capabilities and links to other drug discovery tools and databases.

“After successful completion of Phase I, where we integrated intensive data mining, curation, and computational approaches to suggest biological targets and their small molecule modulators, we now look forward to follow-up studies that will refine and validate our approach,” comments Carolyn Talcott, Ph.D., program director at SRI‘s information and computer sciences division.

CDD says the project will facilitate data sharing and exploitation with other research groups. “The validation of our approach focusing on neglected diseases such as tuberculosis and their research communities has enabled us to develop a technology that can be used for secure sharing of data and is broadly useful,” states Barry Bunin, president and CEO. “We welcome the opportunity to work with other groups to develop our combined ideas into fundable research projects and ultimately commercial products.”

CDD hosts CDD Vault™, a cloud-based database combining traditional drug discovery informatics with social networking capabilities. The firm’s CDD Collaborate™ platform enables real-time collaboration through the secure exchange of selected confidential data with external researchers, and CDD Public™ allows researchers to mine public access data from a variety of scientific data providers.

SRI International is an independent, nonprofit research institute conducting client-sponsored research and development for government agencies, industry, academic, and other research organizations in fields spanning drug discovery and development, health sciences, medical devices, and bioinformatics.

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