Leverage Innovation

On October 1^st, at the J. Gladstone Institute on the UCSF Mission Bay campus, a robust conference of scientists from local universities, government, biotech and pharma companies met to focus on collaboration for advancing research.

Speakers from a diverse set of research support areas presented insightful presentations about how to successfully build cross discipline research communities for neglected diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.  The role of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation was quite evident in making the investment to kick off these communities and fund them where the necessary support services are required.  Takushi Kaneko, Sr. Project Leader, for the TB Alliance, played a key role in working with CDD (Collaborative Drug Discovery) to load over 100,000 compounds for scientists to use in their research related to TB. The TB Alliance provided valuable feedback to CDD on their software as it evolved to modify or add features of value to researchers. 

CDD demonstrated their software prior to the speaker presentations, and announced a completely new streamlined look to their site, with key tabs across the top of he screen to easily find task areas. Moses Holman, VP of Software said they had focused on three main areas: dashboard (to find key results fast right on the user home page), Protocols (to manage the experimental process more effectively with results) and Search (to quickly identify targets).  He added that they are looking to make major changes to the Mine function, offer alerts, and configurable controlled vocabularies to reduce confusion about the same compound or process between databases.   

Jump starting research efforts for neglected diseases means that sharing of research data must be easy, accessible and continuous.  Chris Waller, Sr. Director of Pre Competitive Programs, Pfizer shared how the huge firm is making major investments in the pre competitive market space by supporting the cross corporate Pistoia Alliance, standards group founded by Pfizer, GSK, Astra-Zenca, and Novartis.  The Pistoia Alliance is focused on developing standards for processes, data and research in spaces where firms do not differentiate themselves.   

It was an exciting conference to participate in, with many new ideas floating in the hallways, diverse points of view represented, and a sense of developing momentum toward accelerating the drug development programs for neglected diseases while establishing a new model for how to approach community building. The processes discovered for effective collaboration for neglected diseases are also applicable to the commercial drug development process as well.