The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded a second grant to Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.(CDD) and SRI International to continue joint development of an information repository and software to identify novel therapeutics for tuberculosis (TB).

The phase II Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) grant will support the next two years of research and focus on extending a systems biology-cheminformatics approach to develop molecular mimics and computationally evaluate them for drug efficacy.

CDD and SRI researchers will further evaluate molecules discovered in phase I, expand the scope of search for lead molecules for TB, and develop a software product for bioscience research use. The software will provide powerful query and analysis capabilities, and include 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,” said Carolyn Talcott, PhD, programme director, Information & Computer Science Division at SRI International.

“We are excited to continue our work on this project, which has already resulted in multiple publically accessible datasets that include results of experimental assays and information about drug compounds,” said Sean Ekins, PhD, vice president, Science at CDD. “We will build upon the demonstrated proof-of-concept to identify more compounds active against tuberculosis to include in the repository.”

“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,” said Barry Bunin, president and CEO of CDD, “We welcome the opportunity to work with other groups to develop our combined ideas into fundable research projects and ultimately commercial products.”

The project described was supported by Award Number 2 R42 AI088893-02 from the NIAID. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIAID or the NIH.

CDD provides the most widely used web-based drug discovery software platform on the market. CDD Vault is the secure, private industrial-strength database combining traditional drug discovery informatics (registration and SAR) with social networking capabilities. CDD Collaborate enables real-time collaboration by securely exchanging selected confidential data with external researchers. CDD Public enables researchers to mine a unique aggregation of information from a variety of scientific data providers.

SRI, a nonprofit research and development institute based in Silicon Valley, brings its innovations to the marketplace through technology licensing, new products, and spin-off ventures.